The purpose of our study was to determine whether activemusical engagement alleviates decline in inhibitory controldue to cognitive aging. Given that musical training in youngadults has been shown to improve attentional performance,we can expect this benefit to persist for older adults as well.With the help of the stop-signal procedure, we measuredresponse inhibition of young and older adults who provided aself-reported assessment of their musical engagement, usingthe recently validated Goldsmiths Musical SophisticationIndex. The Gold-MSI addresses a variety of musical activitiesand thus offers a more comprehensive measure than ability toplay a musical instrument used in the past. Results of theexperiment showed that older participants had longer stop-signal reaction times, independently of their musical trainingand engagement, but musical training and ensemble practicewere negatively related to the proportion of missed responsessuggesting a weak effect of certain types of musical activitieson inhibitory control.

In the present study, the correlations of eye blink rate (EBR) with the effective execution of early and late creative idea generation were explored. Participants engaged in a real- world idea generation task. Resting state EBR (before the task) and task-evoked EBR (during the task) were measured using eye-tracking. The results showed that resting state EBR negatively correlated with the amount of generated ideas during early stage, but not late stage idea generation. Task- evoked EBR did not correlate with the amount of generated ideas during early nor late stage idea generation. However, the change in EBR (from resting state to during early or late stage idea generation) positively correlated with the amount of ideas generated during early, but not during late stage idea generation. The contribution of this study is that it shows that EBR predicts and dissociates the effective execution of early and late stage creative idea generation.