Abstract

Creativity is the ability to generate original and useful ideas. Although many studies have shown that cognitive flexibility is important for creative problem solving, empirical evidence supporting the relationship between flexibility, as a component of executive function (EF-flexibility), and creativity is largely lacking in the previous studies. In this review, we sought to provide a conceptual and methodological basis for examining the relationship between EF-flexibility and creativity. To this end, we classified various concepts for flexibility into three perspectives (i.e., creative thought, divergent thinking, and executive functions) and analyzed differences in regard of their conceptual and methodological characteristics. Each perspective provides distinct definition of cognitive flexibility such as a trait of cognition that leads to creative findings, an ability to generate ideas from diverse categories, and an ability to shift between mental sets. In particular, empirical studies of EF-flexibility showed that their results were inconsistent with each other due to adopting different operational definitions for EF-flexibility. Finally, we suggest some essential considerations for measuring EF-flexibility and highlight some topics for future research to concretely understand the relation between EF-flexibility and creativity.