The Role of Creative Mindsets in the Relationship Between Metacognitive Experience and Divergent Thinking: A...

Metacognition is vital for creativity; however, the specific contributions of its components (i.e., metacognition knowledge, metacognition experience, and metacognition monitoring and control) have received varying levels of attention, particularly due to the limited research on metacognitive experience. Additionally, the interactions among these components in influencing creative cognition remain unclear. We conducted two experiments to explore the influence of metacognitive experience on divergent thinking (e.g., alternative uses tasks, AUT) and the moderating role of creative mindsets-a core element of metacognitive knowledge-in this process. In Experiment 1, retrieval fluency, measured by the quantity of the ideas generated, was used to activate varying levels of metacognitive experience (fluency vs. disfluency) during the AUT. The findings showed that the originality of ideas generated under the disfluency condition was significantly higher than under the fluency condition, suggesting a positive effect of metacognitive disfluency experience on AUT. In Experiment 2, a multiple-choice task was used to prime individuals' creative mindsets (entity vs. incremental). The results indicated that individuals with a creative growth mindset exhibited greater cognitive persistence under the disfluency condition, subsequently enhancing the originality of their ideas, indicating that creative mindsets moderate the effect of metacognitive disfluency experience on AUT performance via cognitive persistence. We integrated previous findings to describe the interactive impacts of creative mindsets, metacognitive experience, and metacognitive monitoring and control on divergent and convergent creative thinking processes within a metacognitive framework, providing a model to reveal the dynamic interplay of metacognitive processes in creative cognition. Practically, fostering individuals' growth-oriented creative mindsets may represent a promising avenue for creativity development.