Presentation Master's thesis - Yağmur Yılmaz - Brain & Cognition Psychology

Creativity, commonly defined as the ability to generate novel and useful ideas, is closely linked to divergent thinking, which involves combining different information to produce creative ideas. Recent research suggests that divergent thinking performance is positively associated with brain entropy, defined as the number of neural states the brain can access. Environmental entropy may influence divergent thinking by modulating brain entropy. 

The present study investigates whether environmental entropy affects divergent thinking and whether this effect is moderated by openness to experience, a personality trait associated with curiosity, artistic interests, and originality. Environmental entropy is experimentally manipulated using background videos that vary in entropy (high vs. low). Divergent thinking is assessed using the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), and openness to experience is measured using the openness subscale of the Big Five Inventory. It was hypothesized that exposure to high-entropy environments would enhance divergent thinking performance compared to low-entropy environments. 

Additionally, individuals higher in openness were expected to perform better overall. An interaction was predicted such that the positive effect of environmental entropy would be stronger for individuals high in openness. Results showed no significant effects of entropy or openness to experience on divergent thinking performance. However, a significant interaction between environmental entropy and openness was observed. Notably, this interaction did not follow the predicted pattern: divergent thinking performance tended to increase with openness under low-entropy conditions but decrease under high-entropy conditions. These findings suggest that the effect of environmental variability on divergent thinking depends on individual differences, such as openness, and that increasing entropy does not uniformly enhance creativity.