Creative individuals have been described in terms suggestive of greater automatic processing (e.g., defocused attention, looser associations) and greater controlled processing (e.g., greater abilities to focus while working on a creative task). Both views cannot be correct from a static ability-related perspective. On the other hand, both views could be correct if creative individuals are better able to modulate the functioning of their cognitive control system in a context-sensitive manner. The present study (N ϭ 50) assessed individual differences in creativity in terms of original responses on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1974) and also in terms of creative behavior on the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005). The same participants performed a color-word Stroop task. Creative individuals were neither more nor less capable of overriding cognitive conflicts on incongruent (relative to congruent) Stroop trials. On the other hand, creative individuals displayed more flexible cognitive control, as defined by greater cognitive control modulation from trial to trial. Implications for theories of creativity and its underlying processing basis are discussed.

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Creativity has been putatively linked to distinct forms of attention, but which aspects of creativity and which components of attention remains unclear. Two experiments examined how divergent thinking and creative achievement relate to visual attention. In both experiments, participants identified target letters (S or H) within hierarchical stimuli (global letters made of local letters), after being cued to either the local or global level. In Experiment 1, participants identified the targets more quickly following valid cues (80 % of trials) than following invalid cues. However, this smaller validity effect was associated with higher divergent thinking, suggesting that divergent thinking was related to quicker overcoming of invalid cues, and thus to flexible attention. Creative achievement was unrelated to the validity effect. Experiment 2 examined whether divergent thinking (or creative achievement) is related to "leaky attention," so that when cued to one level of a stimulus, some information is still processed, or leaks in, from the non-cued level. In this case, the cued stimulus level always contained a target, and the non-cued level was congruent, neutral, or incongruent with the target. Divergent thinking did not relate to stimulus congruency. In contrast, high creative achievement was related to quicker responses to the congruent than to the incongruent stimuli, suggesting that real-world creative achievement is indeed associated with leaky attention, whereas standard laboratory tests of divergent thinking are not. Together, these results elucidate distinct patterns of attention for different measures of creativity. Specifically, creative achievers may have leaky attention, as suggested by previous literature, whereas divergent thinkers have selective yet flexible attention.