Abstract
<p>The aim of this thesis was to investigate ‘broad’ creative attention, an attention pattern linked to real-world creative achievement (CA), where individuals detect or respond to a wider range of sensory information. The overarching research question was whether broad attention is ‘leaky, and the result of a deficit in sensory gating, or akin to ‘enhanced perceptual capacity,’ i.e. the ability to process more elements of information. In studying this question, I also addressed the lack of a standard task that tests this attention type reliably. </p><p>A meta-analysis and review (<strong>Chapter 2</strong>) found the relationship between creativity and low latent inhibition was only significant when using a bimodal auditory-visual task and not when using a unimodal visual task. <em>Experiment 1</em> (<strong>Chapter 3</strong>) found that while divergent thinking predicted better distractor suppression at different levels of perceptual load, CA predicted neither superior nor inferior performance. <em>Experim