53). This study examined the role of cognitive inhibition and intelligence in creativity. It was found that cognitive inhibition, assessed by means of the random motor generation task, shows a positive correlation with various measures of creativity

including quantitative indicators of divergent thinking (i.e., ideational fluency and flexibility) and different self-report measures. This provides further direct evidence that creativity is related to executive functions (e.g., Gilhooly et Afatinib al., 2007). Cognitive control in terms of the ability to inhibit salient but irrelevant responses appears to substantially facilitate the fluent generation of new ideas. Effective inhibition may be needed to suppress the increasing proactive interference of previous responses in order not to get stuck with initial ideas. It may thus support the active dissociation from prepotent concepts and promote the steady access to unrelated concepts and ideas, allowing for high ideational fluency (cf.,

Benedek et al., in press). The results, however, appear to conflict with the view of creativity as a “disinhibition syndrome” (Eysenck, 1995 and Martindale, 1999). If disinhibition is understood as the ability to fluently generate many different responses or original ideas, then it has to be concluded that this functional type of disinhibition is related to high cognitive inhibition. This may be different from a dysfunctional type of disinhibition, which may rather result in more perseverative behavior and in the inability to break away from common or previous ideas (Ridley, 1994). Intelligence was found to be related to selleck screening library inhibition and divergent thinking (specifically to ideational originality), but not to self-report measures of Nintedanib (BIBF 1120) creativity. A latent variable model was used to test whether intelligence acts as a mediator in the relationship of cognitive inhibition and divergent thinking. It revealed that cognitive inhibition specifically drives the fluency and flexibility of idea generation (i.e., the quantitative aspect of ideation), while intelligence has a positive effect on the originality

of ideas (i.e., the qualitative aspect of ideation). This fits nicely to recent evidence showing that intelligence is particularly relevant to creativity, when creativity is defined by originality rather than mere fluency (Nusbaum and Silvia, 2011 and Silvia, in press). Moreover, the findings could be seen in line with the Geneplore model (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992), with inhibition being more related to the “generation” stage and intelligence contributing to the “exploration” stage. For the scoring of ideational originality we employed a method that avoids a trivial correlation of fluency and originality (Silvia et al., 2008). Nevertheless, these two measures still show a substantial positive correlation at the latent level. Our model here did not assume a unidirectional relation, as both directions are generally conceivable and thus might be operant.