Abstract

Creative thinking is defined as a mental process that involves novel and useful idea generation. Executive functions (EF's), a set of goal-directed cognitive functions, can play an important role in creative thinking. However, previous findings reported conflicting results regarding the relation between creative thinking and EF's. In this meta-analysis study, we aimed to identify moderator effects of the EF types and/or congruency between stimulus modalities used in creative thinking and EF tasks, by analyzing 232 effects from 28 research papers. For this purpose, each EF task used in the previous studies was subdivided into ‘semantic’ and ‘domain-general’. Additionally, the stimulus modalities used in the creative thinking and EF tasks were divided into ‘verb’, ‘non-verb’, and ‘multi-modal’, and were classified as ‘same’ or ‘different’ according to the congruency between the tasks. The results showed that the effect sizes for creative thinking were greater in the semantic EF compared to domain-general EF, and those of the same modality were greater than different modality. In conclusion, it appears to be necessary to consider the type of EF and the stimulus modality of tasks for the relation between creative thinking and EF's.