The Physiological Response during Divergent Thinking

Abstract

Our research studied the physiological response of participants during a creative task to investi-gate if a person's psychophysiological state was correlated with divergent thinking performance. We used heart rate variability as our physiological measure. We asked 50 participants to perform a cognitive task that assessed their divergent thinking skills and recorded their heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) before and during the task. Frequency domain analysis was per-formed on the HRV. The results showed that there was a significant negative correlation between log-transformed low frequency HRV power and the number of " divergent thinking " words gener-ated. Our results suggest that a person's psychophysiological state is correlated with their diver-gent thinking performance, and that attention and motivation may be important factors, however this needs further research. Our findings also suggest that being in a relaxed state before the start of a creative task is not a predictor of creative performance.