Mind wandering during creative incubation predicts increases in creative performance in a writing task.

Summary

Taking a break from a creative writing task can improve subsequent performance if the mind wanders during that break, even though the type of break activity itself does not matter. In a preregistered experiment, participants wrote two short stories separated by a 10-minute incubation period involving a memory task, meditation, or no break. No single break type boosted creativity more than others. However, across all conditions, participants who reported more mind wandering during the break showed greater improvement in the semantic creativity of their second story—but only when they continued working on the same story prompt. This benefit was specific to mind wandering and not to other thoughts, such as deliberately thinking about the story, and held even after accounting for people's general tendency to mind wander.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that taking breaks from creative problem solving (i.e., incubation periods) enhances subsequent performance, possibly due to mind wandering during these breaks. The present preregistered study investigated whether different types of incubation periods, designed to either promote or suppress mind wandering, influence creativity in a writing task. Participants wrote two fictional short stories based on a prompt, separated by a 10-min incubation task (0-back task, 2-back task, mindfulness meditation, or no-break control). To distinguish story-specific incubation effects from more general cognitive benefits, some participants received the same prompt after the break while others received a new prompt. Mind wandering during incubation was assessed with a validated retrospective questionnaire and story creativity was evaluated by both human raters and a semantic distance-based measure. Results showed no significant differences in creative improvement (pre- to post-incubation) across incubation tasks. However, regardless of task, greater mind wandering during incubation predicted greater within-subject creative improvement, as assessed by semantic distance, for participants who received the same prompt after the break but not for those who received a new prompt. Notably, this benefit was specific to mind wandering and did not extend to other types of thought during incubation, including explicit thought about the story. The relationship remained significant after controlling for dispositional mind wandering and was corroborated by creativity ratings from GPT-4. These findings suggest a potentially beneficial role of mind wandering during the incubation of a creative writing task.