关键词: 创造力, 自主性动机, 认知抑制能力

Abstract: Creativity refers to the ability to generate novel and meaningful ideas or products that can be accepted by a particular social culture. Through the comprehensive analysis of previous literature, we found that almost all theories and studies emphasized the influences of motivation and cognitive factors on creativity. Among all the types of motivation and cognitive factors, autonomous motivation and cognitive inhibition drew significant attention. Autonomous motivation, proposed by Deci and Ryan (2000) in the Self-determination Theory (SDT), is a type of highly internalized motivation that an individual is fully aware of the importance of action and identifies with specific rules deeply. It includes identified regulation, integrated regulation, and intrinsic motivation. According to the empirical findings, autonomous motivation positively predicted the levels of creativity of primary and middle school students. The present study aims to identify whether autonomous motivation can predict creativity positively in college students in the same way as in primary and middle school students. According to previous studies, individuals with a higher level of autonomous motivation can think creatively under certain stimulations and devote themselves to activities with great enthusiasm, which generally leads to a positive outcome, including high creativity. However, a high level of autonomous motivation also leads to the influx of irrelevant information, which reduces the stability of attention and interfere with normal activities. Whether a high level of autonomous motivation enhances or weakens behavioral performance depends on how the motivation interacts with the executive function of the brain. Such interaction serves as an essential moderator in the cognitive procedure, while cognitive inhibition is the most crucial cognitive processing mechanism of the executive function. The role of cognitive inhibition is to help individuals to choose appropriate resources or reactions, abandon wrong and worthless ideas, reduce the confusion and unnecessary errors in the information processing system, and limit consciousness only to the information related to the goal. It means that cognitive inhibition inhibits the adverse effects of excessive autonomous motivation and promotes the positive effects of autonomous motivation on creativity. In other words, cognitive inhibition moderates the relationship between autonomous motivation and creativity positively. Researchers also found that cognitive inhibition was associated with fluency and flexibility, not originality. Therefore, the present study further postulated that cognitive inhibition moderated autonomous motivation's prediction on two indicators of creativity: fluency and flexibility, but not originality. Three hundred and seventy-two college students participated in this study. They were required to complete the color-word Stroop task in the laboratory. Then they were required to complete two questionnaires, namely, Autonomous Motivation Questionnaire and Runco Ideational Behavior Scale (RIBS). SPSS 17.0 and Hierarchical regression analysis were used to manage the data and test the hypothesis. Results were as follows: (1) Autonomous motivation positively predicted originality, while cognitive inhibition did not moderate autonomous motivation's prediction on originality. (2) Cognitive inhibition moderated the relationship between autonomous motivation and fluency/flexibility in a similar way. Specifically, autonomous motivation positively predicted the fluency/flexibility of individuals with a higher level of cognitive inhibition, but not those with lower cognitive inhibition levels. These results deepened the understanding of the relationship between autonomous motivation and creativity at the conceptual level, which was of significant practical significance for the cultivation of creativity.

Key words: creativity, autonomous motivation, cognitive inhibition