Boundless Creativity: Evidence for the Domain Generality of Individual Differences in Creativity

Need for Cognition Is Positively Related to Promotion Focus and Negatively Related to Prevention Focus

Need for cognition (NFC) and regulatory focus (RF) are important variables with individual differences relevant to motivation and goal pursuit. These constructs are widely used in the literature, often separately; no work has simultaneously examined the need for cognition scale (NCS) and Lockwood’s general regulatory focus measure (GRFM). Here, we explore shared theoretical underpinnings of the two constructs and assess whether they may be driven by common underlying factors. Considering purported overlaps between these scales and other constructs (e.g., personality and cognitive processes), we take a strong inference approach to test hypothesized bridges between the two measures. In a large (N = 853) sample, we found NCS to be related positively to GRFM promotion and negatively to GRFM prevention scores, suggesting mutual ties with behavioral inhibition system/behavioral activation system, intrinsic motivation, openness, and creativity. A generalized approach motivation, as well as intrinsic motivation, may thus drive both NFC and RF.

The Contribution of Executive Functions in Predicting Mathematical Creativity in Typical Elementary School Classes: A Twofold Role for Updating

The goal of the current study was to investigate the role of executive functions in mathematical creativity. The sample included 278 primary school children (ages 8–13). Two models were compared: the starting model tested whether executive functions (shifting, updating, and inhibition), domain-general creativity, and mathematical ability directly predicted mathematical creativity. The second model, which fitted the data best, included the additional assumption that updating influences mathematical creativity indirectly through mathematical ability and domain-general creativity. Updating was positively related to mathematical creativity. Additionally, updating was positively related to mathematical ability and domain-general creativity. Inhibition, shifting, domain-general creativity and mathematical ability did not have a significant contribution to either model but did positively correlate with mathematical creativity. This study reports the first empirical evidence that updating is a predictor of mathematical creativity in primary school children and demonstrates that creativity is a higher order cognitive process, activating a variety of cognitive abilities.

Ein Vergleich traditioneller und computergestützter Methoden zur Erstellung einer deutschsprachigen Need for Cognition Kurzskala

Zusammenfassung. Die vorliegende Arbeit dient der Entwicklung einer Kurzskala zur Messung von Need for Cognition (NFC). Neben traditionellen Verfahren der Itemreduktion auf Basis von Itemkennwerten der klassischen Testtheorie wurde in Studie 1 ( N = 282) ein neues, computergestütztes Verfahren des „full information approach“ vorgestellt. Mithilfe der beiden Verfahren wurden 3 mögliche Skalen mit jeweils 5 Items selektiert, welche in einem unabhängigen Datensatz in Studie 2 ( N = 530) Validierungskriterien unterzogen wurden. Aus den 3 Skalen mit ähnlichen Ergebnissen bezüglich der Gütekriterien wurde eine anhand der „full information approach“ erstellten Skalen als finale Kurzskala NFC-K ausgewählt. Diese NFC-K weist ein Cronbachs α von .69 auf, eine Korrelation mit der Langskala von .81 und keinen signifikanten Zusammenhang mit sozialer Erwünschtheit. Neben der systematischen und objektiven Selektion und Validierung der Kurzskala NFC-K stellt die vorliegende Arbeit auch eine Fallstudie zu den Herausforderungen der Kurzskalenentwicklung auf Basis klassischer und computergestützter Selektionsverfahren dar.

Methodological Issues in Measuring Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review

The growing body of creativity research has raised several challenging issues with regard to the measurement of this construct. This paper aims to provide a review of current challenging methodological issues related to measuring creativity. Five methodological issues are discussed: selecting measurement instruments, sampling, testing conditions, psychometric properties and domain-generality/specificity of creativity. This paper reveals that there remain a number of unresolved issues and serious questions surrounding the measurement of creativity. Research gaps and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Participation of the left inferior frontal gyrus in human originality

Human creative cognition is commonly described as a twofold cyclic process that involves an idea generation phase and an idea evaluation phase. Although the evaluation phase makes a crucial contribution to originality, its underlying mechanisms have not received sufficient research attention. Here, we suggest that the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) plays a major role in the interplay between the evaluation and generation networks and that inhibiting this region's activity may have an effect on "releasing" the generation neural network, resulting in greater originality. To examine the neural networks that mediate the generation and evaluation of ideas, we conducted an fMRI experiment on a group of healthy human participants (Study 1), in which we compared an idea generation task to an idea evaluation task. We found that evaluating the originality of ideas is indeed associated with a relative increase in lIFG activation, as opposed to generating original ideas. We further showed that temporarily inhibiting the lIFG using continuous theta-burst stimulation (Study 2) results in less strict evaluation on the one hand and increased originality scores on the other. Our findings provide converging evidence from multiple methods to show that the lIFG participates in evaluating the originality of ideas.

Is creative insight task-specific? A coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on insightful problem solving

The question of whether creative insight varies across problem types has recently come to the forefront of studies of creative cognition. In the present study, to address the nature of creative insight, the coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) technique was utilized to individually conduct three quantitative meta-analyses of neuroimaging experiments that used the compound remote associate (CRA) task, the prototype heuristic (PH) task and the Chinese character chunk decomposition (CCD) task. These tasks were chosen because they are frequently used to uncover the neurocognitive correlates of insight. Our results demonstrated that creative insight reliably activates largely non-overlapping brain regions across task types, with the exception of some shared regions: the CRA task mainly relied on the right parahippocampal gyrus, the superior frontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus; the PH task primarily depended on the right middle occipital gyrus (MOG), the bilateral superior parietal lobule/precuneus, the left inferior parietal lobule, the left lingual gyrus and the left middle frontal gyrus; and the CCD task activated a broad cerebral network consisting of most dorsolateral and medial prefrontal regions, frontoparietal regions and the right MOG. These results provide the first neural evidence of the task dependence of creative insight. The implications of these findings for resolving conflict surrounding the different theories of creative cognition and for defining insight as a set of heterogeneous processes are discussed.

Thin slices of creativity: using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition

We investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in creative cognition can be manifest even in brief responses, such as single-word utterances. Participants (n = 193) were instructed to say a verb upon seeing a noun displayed on a computer screen and were cued to respond creatively to half of the nouns. For every noun-verb pair (72 pairs per subject), we assessed the semantic distance between the noun and the verb, using latent semantic analysis (LSA). Semantic distance was higher in the cued ("creative") condition than the uncued condition, within subjects. Critically, between subjects, semantic distance in the cued condition had a strong relationship to a creativity factor derived from a battery of verbal, nonverbal, and achievement-based creativity measures (β= .50), and this relation remained when controlling for intelligence and personality. The data show that creative cognition can be assessed reliably and validly from such thin slices of behavior.