Do demanding filler tasks during a break reduce or enhance incubation effects on creative thinking?

Why stepping away from a problem can help at all

The incubation effect is the common experience of getting stuck on a problem, stepping away, and then finding the solution seems easier when you return. In one experiment, participants who took time away from a problem and worked on another task showed better creative problem solving than those who did not [1]. A separate study likewise reported that filler tasks used to occupy attention during a break promoted the incubation effect [4].

The leading explanation is not that the break does the creative work for you. Instead, the break may allow useful mental processes to continue in the background, which is why researchers have focused on mind wandering, the tendency for thoughts to drift away from the task at hand, as a possible contributor [2][3].

Does the filler task need to be demanding or easy?

The evidence does not support a simple rule that demanding filler tasks enhance incubation. In a preregistered writing study, participants wrote two short stories separated by a ten-minute break that was either a 0-back task, a 2-back task, mindfulness meditation, or no break at all. The 2-back task is the more demanding of the two, since it requires holding and updating information, while the 0-back task is a simple reaction task. There were no significant differences in creative improvement across these break conditions [3].

What did matter was mind wandering during the break. Regardless of which break task participants did, greater mind wandering predicted greater creative improvement, but only for participants who returned to the same story prompt after the break, not for those given a new prompt [3]. That scope matters: the benefit appeared when the break was tied to a problem the person had already encountered. The benefit was also specific to mind wandering and did not extend to explicitly thinking about the story during the break [3].

What happens when the break itself is interrupted?

A break is not always a clean stretch of drifting thought. One planned study set out to test whether interrupting an undemanding break task with online thought probes, which ask people what they are thinking about in the moment, would erase the incubation benefit. The researchers reasoned that such probes might make people aware of their thinking and disrupt the implicit, associative processing that is thought to support incubation [2]. That study is a design and hypothesis paper, so it does not yet tell us whether the interruption actually reduces creative gains.

The same study also planned to compare thought probes with neutral knowledge questions, to separate the effect of being interrupted from the effect of being made aware of one's own thoughts [2]. Until those results are reported, the question of whether interruptions during a break harm incubation remains open.

The effect may depend on the kind of creative task

Incubation is not a single uniform phenomenon. One experiment examined both convergent thinking, measured with a remote association task, and divergent thinking, measured with an alternative uses task. For convergent thinking, incubation effects differed according to the break activity and whether participants had a choice in the task: the incubation group with no choice in tasks showed significant performance improvement compared with the group that had a choice. For divergent thinking, there were no differences in incubation effects according to break activities or task choice [1].

So a filler task during a break may help some kinds of creative problems more than others, and the conditions around the break, such as whether the person chooses the activity, can matter as much as the activity itself [1]. The practical takeaway is not to seek out the most demanding distraction, but to allow a break in which the mind can drift, especially when returning to a problem you have already worked on [3].

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