What’s behind deliberation? The effect of task-related mind-wandering on post-incubation creativity

Previous studies have already suggested that the deliberate nature of Mind-Wandering (MW) is critical for promoting creative performance. However, the deliberate nature of MW may be mixed up with task-relatedness. Whether the deliberate nature or task-relatedness of MW is responsible for such positive influence remains unclear. The present study tried to address this issue by investigating the influence of deliberate MW (MW-d) and task-related MW (MW-r) on post-incubation creative performance. Our result showed that MW-d is positively correlated with MW-r and spontaneous MW (MW-s) is highly positively correlated with task-unrelated MW (MW-u). Meanwhile, after controlling the possible confounding variables (i.e., the pre-incubation creative performance, the performance during distraction task, and motivation on creative ideation), both MW-d and MW-r predicted participants’ AUT performance after incubation. However, the prediction model based on MW-r was stable while the MW-d-based prediction model was not. These findings indicate that the task-relatedness of MW, instead of its deliberate nature, might have a positive influence on subsequent creative performance.