Eye Blink Rate Predicts and Dissociates Effective Execution of Early and Late Stage Creative Idea Generation

In the present study, the correlations of eye blink rate (EBR) with the effective execution of early and late creative idea generation were explored. Participants engaged in a real-world idea generation task. Resting state EBR (before the task) and task-evoked EBR (during the task) were measured using eye-tracking. The results showed that resting state EBR negatively correlated with the amount of generated ideas during early stage, but not late stage idea generation. Task-evoked EBR did not correlate with the amount of generated ideas during early nor late stage idea generation. However, the change in EBR (from resting state to during early or late stage idea generation) positively correlated with the amount of ideas generated during early, but not during late stage idea generation. The contribution of this study is that it shows that EBR predicts and dissociates the effective execution of early and late stage creative idea generation.

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