The Role of Selective Attention in Bilingual Creativity

Abstract

The study presents a systematic investigation of the cognitive mechanisms of selective attention that potentially mediate the effect of bilingualism on creative abilities. The performance of 90 bilingual college students with different proficiency levels in English was compared on a battery of creativity and cognitive measures. Linguistically advanced bilinguals demonstrated greater abilities to produce original and useful ideas and to think beyond standard categories in creative problem-solving. Two mechanisms of selective attention were identified as contributors to the improvement of bilingual creative abilities. The inhibition of irrelevant information seemed to enhance the capacity to produce original and useful ideas. The facilitation of relevant information was likely to boost the ability to activate a multitude of unrelated concepts and work through the concepts already activated. Bilinguals with different levels of linguistic skills were found to utilize these mechanisms differently and thereby to employ different strategies in creative problem-solving.

Acknowledgments

I thank Jeanette Altarriba for her very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹To account for numerous discussions in bilingualism research, bilinguals are defined as individuals who are fluent in two languages, those who actively use, or attempt to use more than one language, even if they have not achieved fluency in their second language (Kroll & de Groot, 1997). Obviously, these individuals would have a different history of language acquisition. Therefore, it is prudent to consider various factors in language development that may have a potential impact on their degree of bilingualism.

Note. IAC = Invented Alien Creatures task, CFIT = Culture Fair Intelligence Test battery.

²There is an opinion that the size of the Stroop effect is related to automaticity of word reading, with faster or more automatic reading producing more interference and larger Stroop effects (MacLeod, 1991; Meiran, 1996). However, the findings of this study contradict this argument by showing that (a) there is no correlation between the Stroop effect and RT in the word-reading condition; (b) there is no difference between high- and moderate-proficiency groups on RT in the word reading condition; and (c) bilinguals with greater language proficiency produce a smaller Stroop effect.