What inspires us during a creative act? We know from past research that apparently irrelevant information for a task at hand can lead to higher creative performance, especially in open-minded individuals. But what does irrelevance mean and how can open-minded individuals be inspired by this kind of information? Through two diverse experimental procedures, the present work investigated which type of irrelevance information inspires (i.e., increases) the creative performance during a divergent thinking (DT) task. In Experiment 1, the attentional processing of information that was either relevant or irrelevant for the execution of a verbal DT task was assessed by means of an eye-tracking methodology. In Experiment 2, creative performance was explored through a verbal priming paradigm, which forcedly introduced irrelevant information during the DT task. In both experiments, the level of irrelevance was operationalized in terms of semantic distance between the information that is central for the task at hand and the information that is apparently irrelevant for its execution. Results from both experiments highlighted the role of irrelevant information and of the Openness trait in influencing the originality or uncommonness of the responses produced during the task as well as the role of the semantic meaning of the irrelevant information as one of the main determinants of inspiration (i.e., enhancement) of the creative performance. Inspiration emerged therefore to be related to the meaning of the inspirational (i.e., apparently irrelevant) information in a given context and to the individual disposition to process this kind of information.
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