Impact of visual stimuli on mind mapping-supported creativity task performance and experience

School education has increasingly emphasized the cultivation of students’ creativity and creative thinking abilities. Cognitive approaches such as mind mapping have been widely used to promote creative thinking. Mind mapping is effective in fostering creative thinking by helping people represent, organize, expand, and combine ideas. However, it has a limitation in supporting flexibility in thinking (i.e., creating ideas beyond habitual patterns or familiar categories of knowledge). Visual stimuli (e.g., pictures) can provide cues beyond people’s habitual thinking patterns. Moreover, they can enhance the sense of immersion and reduce the mental effort required to process information. This study aimed to address the limitation of mind mapping by incorporating task-relevant, heterogeneous, and low-fidelity pictures as visual stimuli to facilitate creative thinking. We investigated how visual stimuli might affect students’ task performance and experience when performing mind mapping-supported creativity tasks. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with high school students ( N = 103). The results show that compared with those only using mind mapping, students using both mind mapping and visual stimuli achieved better performance on creativity tasks in flexibility as well as in fluency and originality; they also experienced a higher level of flow state without a detectable increase in cognitive load. The findings offer new insights into the benefits of visual stimuli in supporting mind mapping-supported creativity task performance and experience.