Are All Measures of Inhibition Creatively Equal?

Previous research revealed mixed findings regarding the direction of the relation of inhibition and creativity. The goal of this study was to determine if the task used to measure inhibition accounts for this variance in direction and if these various tasks would demonstrate convergent validity, despite contention that inhibition cannot be deconstructed into separate types. It was hypothesized that attention inhibition measures would correlate negatively to creativity, whereas memory inhibition measures would correlate positively. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the inhibition measures did not demonstrate convergent validity based on the proposed two factor model of attention and memory inhibition. Also, most of the inhibition tasks were unrelated to creativity and intelligence, though the n-back task, a memory inhibition measure, positively predicted scores on the Remote Associates Test, a convergent thinking creativity test (r(59) = .39, p = 0.002).