Alien Creatures Research Articles

한국 OTT 콘텐츠의 글로벌 시장 진출 전략

Although Korean video contents began its journey to the global market along with the popularity in Asia in the latter 1990s, the genres exported were mostly drama and most of the importers were Asian countries. However, recently, we have seen a series of successes of Korean OTT contents such as <Kingdom>, <Squid Game> and <The Glory> in the world market. The study explored the strategies for Korean OTT contents to enter the global market by analyzing the story-telling of Korean OTT contents from the perspective of cultural proximity. In the past, Korean video contents focused on specific subjects and genres such as love and socio-historical events. However, the recent Korean video contents are expanding to cover various subjects and genres. Especially, they pro-actively use the subjects and genres represented by Hollywood such as zombies, science and adventures, constructing universal story-telling that can heighten cultural proximity and adding characteristics of Korean culture, which secured competitiveness as Korean contents. While <Kingdom> and <All of Us Are Dead> chose zombies, a regular subject representing Hollywood, unlike the existing zombie products, they presented an epic for the zombies to induce sympathy of the recipients. Also, they secured differentiation from the existing zombie products by arranging unique backgrounds such as the Chosun Dynasty and the school. Also, unlike the Hollywood contents such as zombies or monsters emerging as a result of viruses or environmental pollution, in the Korean products, the alien creatures were born as variables of human desire and this resulted in destruction of the human race. This puts emphasis on human spiritual culture, meaning the Oriental value system. Also, while increasing cultural proximity by using the universal problems of the contemporary society such as materialism and violence, they led the recipients to take interest in Korean play culture such as ‘Red Light Green Light’, ‘Dalgona Candy’ and ‘Squid Game’. As can be seen from this, Korean OTT contents, while securing familiarity by adding Oriental cultural characteristics to universal culture codes, constructed new stories, resulting in favorable responses from the recipients.

Cuteness modulates size sound symbolism at its extremes

Abstract Despite the rapidly growing body of research on sound symbolism, one issue that remains understudied is whether different types of sensory information interact in their sound symbolic effects. The experimental study reported here consisted of two tasks and focused on one such potential interaction: size associations and cuteness. First, a forced-choice task was conducted in which size ratings were elicited for pseudowords containing different vowels and consonants. The pseudowords were introduced as names of alien creatures, which were used as visual stimuli in the experiment. Second, the cuteness of alien creatures was assessed in a judgement task. Both tasks were completed by the same group of German speakers. In line with previous research, /aː/ was associated with largeness and /iː/ was associated with smallness. Further, we found that cuteness modulates size associations in /aː/ and /iː/. For /aː/ judged size increased, while for /iː/ judged size decreased with increasing cuteness. Regarding consonants, we found that /ʁ/ evoked higher size associations than other consonants under investigation. Interactions of cuteness and consonants did not reach significance. Our findings call for the integration of other possible factors and features that might show sound symbolic effects or interactions with such in sound symbolism research.

Listening to Linda Griffiths: Heeding to the Archives of an Emblematic Voice in Canadian Theatre

Linda Griffiths, actor and playwright, was a charismatic and vital presence within Canadian theatre from the early 1970s, writing and performing until her untimely death in 2014. She worked in theatres across Canada all the while maintaining her dedication to her home, Theatre Passe Muraille, creating award-winning pieces that were also audience hits. This article presents and employs an archival methodology that the author calls listening to Linda. In the first part of this piece, the author makes key historiographical interventions in Canadian theatre history based on her recognition of (and attentive listening to) Griffiths’s own historiographical intervention, made via her self-created and deliberately preserved archival record as well as her published autobiographical writing and interviews. Research into the Linda Griffiths fonds sheds new light on the early years of her career (1971–75) that have yet to be discussed in existing studies and rectifies misrepresentations of her story, repositioning her in the field of Canadian theatre. This methodology also sheds new light upon the analysis of her plays. In the case of O.D. on Paradise, by returning attention to this overlooked text the author discovered a multifaceted moment within Griffiths’s growth as a playwright which intertwines with the play’s historical importance. Research into Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen revivifies the scholarly discussion on this well-known auto/biographical piece by perceiving Griffiths’s voice within her archive and in performance as insisting Canadian women artists be heard, believing in the lasting power of their work. Therefore, by listening to this creator’s voice within her self-curated archive, the author’s methodology enables a shifting of knowledge regarding Griffiths’s contributions to Canadian theatre, the remembering of lost histories, and the lasting effects of performance.

Между Паном и Серым Волком: дионисийские вариации

Mariam Petrosyan’s novel “The House in which ...” uses a model of two worlds and involves several teenage trickster heroes who can go into another reality called “The Forest”, as well as take other children there. The paradigm for such a plot structure in European literature aimed at children and adolescents is D. Barry’s book “Peter Pan”. Her hero is correlated with a pagan Pan, and he takes boys from ordinary families to his island. Peter Pan does not want to grow up and does not know love; the children he takes away must be cheerful and heartless. The immobile time on Peter Pan Island and the lack of love there contrast this world with Christian culture, but they bring it closer to the pagan – Dionysian world, in the words of F. Nietzsche. This construction proved to be very fruitful in the European mass literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. However, in Mariam Petrosyan’s novel, in contrast to this literature, the images of tricksters are not cultivated. They preserve and show the werewolf, dark, dangerous nature. This interpretation of the trickster is connected with the specifics of the Russian literary tradition. Since the time of Romanticism, which established the model of two worlds, the other world in this tradition was usually presented as hostile to man. In the modern era, the two-world model has regained its validity. This was largely due to the fact that the aesthetics of Russian modernism adopted the Nietzschean concept of Dionysianism, specifically interpreted as an appeal to soil culture. However, on the part of traditionally thinking writers, such pochvennichestvo met with rejection. He was criticized by Ivan Bunin, in the story “Sukhodol”, contrasting Christianity with him as the only mechanism for preserving cultural memory. In the 21st century, in the stories of Elena Chizhova, Irina Bogatyreva, Evgenia Nekrasova, the model of two worlds with an appeal to soil culture was again actualized. The characters of the other world were depicted in them as assistants to the heroes, but at the same time unsafe and alien creatures. This interpretation of the trickster is close to the image of a magical assistant in a fairy tale. It was she who was realized in the novel by Mariam Petrosyan.

Gerald E. Bentley, Jr., <i>William Blake’s Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis</i>

Most of the primary material in William Blake’s Conversations will be familiar to those who have studied Gerald E. Bentley’s two editions of Blake Records, Blake Records Supplement, and his 2001 biography, The Stranger from Paradise, but the scholarly alchemy effected by distilling reports of Blake’s spoken words into a compact volume and adding an array of related tools has created something rich, strange, and likely to prove enduringly useful. Because many of the reports come to us from within a generation or two after Blake’s death, they are strongly colored by the late Georgian/early Victorian conception of him: these Blakeish words often seem to reflect the minds of the reporters as much as they reveal the mind of Blake, and as the intervening years and layers of reportage multiply, the share of credible Blake content diminishes. A snippet of Blake’s conversation that was worth retelling or recording is likely to have been one that conformed to, or at least resonated with, the other stories about Blake in circulation at the time. Gathered together in largely unmediated form, these reports constitute a portrait of a fellow we might call Anecdotal Blake, a somewhat different being from the persona we moderns know through his works in ink and paint, Autographic Blake. Ironically, Autographic Blake was not very well known to some of the original constructors of Anecdotal Blake—even to ones who knew Flesh and Blood Blake himself. Those modern readers who are thoroughly acquainted with Autographic Blake may find the shimmery Anecdotal Blake who rises in these pages to be an uncanny and alien creature, but it is intriguing to hear his voice, and like any chatty ghost he may have things to tell us beyond the grave.

“Everything / we husband is always shedding”: intimacy, distance, and the politics of migration in Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence

ABSTRACT Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence observes both the importance of intimacy and the fundamental irreducibility at the heart of intimacy. The collection highlights family ties, but it also concedes that there remains a strangeness at the core of those ties: sometimes “kin insists,” sometimes the child feels less “son” than uncanny “monster.” Darcy then inverts this point: if there is something foreign about our kin, we might also find kinship with beings whom we would otherwise consider foreign. Darcy’s primary concerns here are refugeeism (especially the European migrant crisis) and ecological devastation. On the former point, Insistence imagines transnational community, asking us to move beyond pity and towards motivating empathy for displaced peoples. On the latter, Darcy illuminates our interspecies interrelationships, reminding us that even our planet’s most seemingly alien creatures (cockroaches; silverfish) are the cohabitants of our shared biosphere. Ultimately, Insistence develops a deep ethic of care for all living beings.

Cultural Variations in Evaluation of Creative Work: A Comparison of Russian and Emirati Samples.

The study investigates how cultural variations influence evaluation of creative work. Russian and Emirati undergraduate college students were asked to judge alien creature drawings produced by their country mates in previous studies’ structured imagination test. We found cultural differences in creativity judgment. Emirati participants’ judgments were significantly lower than Russian participants’ judgments. We also found that Russians judged their compatriots significantly higher than the Emirati judged their compatriots. Russians also judged foreigners significantly lower than the Emirati judged foreigners. These findings were speculatively placed in the context of the cultural differences in the implicit theory of creativity.

The Role of Popular Culture for Queer Teen Identities’ Formation in Netflix’s Sex Education

Queer teenagers are avid readers of popular culture; as numerous audience studies prove, television plays a significant role in identity-formation for LGBTIQ+ youth, providing them with the information about sexuality, gender roles or non-normative relationships usually unavailable in their educational and home environments. In this article we analyze how some of the protagonists of Netflix’s TV show <em>Sex Education </em>(2019-present) utilize popular culture as a tool to explore their desires, forbidden fantasies, and gender expressions, becoming instrumental in the formation of their queer identities in a way that metatextually reflects the role LGBTIQ+ shows play for their audiences. Such is the case of Adam, a bisexual teenager that masturbates to the image of a fictional actor featured in a 1980s action film poster; Lily, whose sexual fantasies of role playing with alien creatures are strongly influenced by spatial sci-fi; and Ola, whose onyric universe is influenced by David Bowie’s genderbending aesthetics. However, the most representative example of how popular culture influences the formation of queer identities is Eric, whose non-conforming gender expression follows the example set by the trans characters in <em>Hedwig and the Angry Inch</em>.

Preference for Complexity and Asymmetry Contributes to an Ability to Overcome Structured Imagination: Implications for Creative Perception Paradigm

The study is a part of a research project, which explores the role of creative perception in creative behavior. We operationalized creative behavior as an ability to overcome structured imagination, as measured by the Invented Alien Creature test, and operationalized creative perception as a preference for complexity and asymmetry, which we assessed using a standard Barron–Welsh Art Scale. Our group of participants was composed of ninety-three undergraduate students from the United Arab Emirates. The degree to which one preferred complexity and asymmetry measurably contributed to their ability to overcome structured imagination. This finding adds another brick to the rising seventh pillar of the creativity construct, namely, creative perception. The article provides a first sketch of the creative perception paradigm.

Xenopolitics

Xenopolitics Matthew A. Taylor (bio) and Priscilla Wald (bio) Lilith Iyapo wakes up after a very long sleep—more than two centuries—to discover she had developed cancer and been cured. The alien creatures who cured her, moreover, have altered her genetically, fixing the underlying mutation that predisposed her to cancer. That's the least of her revelations, actually, since the alien species did much more than cure Lilith. They rescued remnants of humanity and Earth from annihilation following an apocalyptic nuclear war. For their part, the Oankali find themselves ineluctably drawn to these self-destructive beings they have saved from certain death. And they consider cancer to be one of humanity's great "talents," a gift to the Oankali, since it helps them perfect their healing abilities. The sentiment is not returned. For Lilith and most of her species, the cure, the genetic alterations, even the rescue comes at too great a cost. The Oankali, they learn, are gene traders; they travel through the cosmos bringing their gifts to the alien beings they encounter, but they insist on breeding with them, making them evolve into something unrecognizable. Radical ecologists and vegetarians existing symbiotically with their environment, the Oankali view these changes as necessary for healthy life, but the humans experience them as tantamount to extinction, a dangerous loss of humanity rather than an evolutionary advance. Where the Oankali define life as inherently dynamic, mutable, and relational, the humans imagine it as stable, conservative, and fixed in discrete bodies. The clash over these interpretations of life propels Octavia Butler's Dawn, the first novel in a trilogy she published in the last three years of the 1980s, just prior to the founding of the Human Genome Project, and against the backdrop of the emergence of biotechnology as a multibillion-dollar industry. Biotech formed the backdrop as well of Michel Foucault's discussion, a decade earlier, of biopower and biopolitics; the influence is evident, for example, in his reference to humanity's imminent capacity "not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive."1 Viewing these attempts to harness evolution as the culmination of biopower, Foucault imagines their ultimate termination of life as we know it. [End Page 895] Dawn registers more ambivalence about the prospects of biopower. Consummate biotechnicians and biopoliticians, the Oankali have all but perfected the management of life—in part because such management is a natural expression of their being, a lifestyle rather than a business. They have no politics, law, economy, or culture independent of life's own immanent processes. The novel complicates this perspective, however, by insisting on the irresolvable tension between the human and Oankali norms of life; neither endorsing nor dismissing, the narrative allows their opposition to illuminate the simultaneous inevitability and impossibility of life-based governance. If the Oankali speak in the voice of the biopolitical state, it is unclear to what extent it is the voice of tyranny, of liberty, of social welfare, or simply of evolutionary process, and whether they offer utopian promise or eugenic, even genocidal, peril. The humans' bioconservativism, by contrast, could represent either a principled adherence to the "natural" or a social Darwinist, laissez-faire commitment to letting life realize its own imperatives.2 Two definitions of life, two ways of life, no answers or resolutions. Which group truly speaks in the name of life? Dawn refuses to say. Instead, the novel offers what Foucault arguably doesn't: insight into not only the manipulation of life as a form of power but also the idea of life as a mythos—hence into the appeal as well as the danger of biopower. "Life" emerges, for Foucault, at the turn of the nineteenth century when biology broke from natural history's mere observation and classification of living things in order to explore "life itself": the principle, force, or essence animating—and transcending—everything alive.3 Increasingly, the living came to be seen as merely imperfect, epiphenomenal manifestations of life-as-such, which tended to create not only a distinction but also an opposition between what lives...

Does Scope of Attention Affect Creativity? Testing the Attentional Priming Hypothesis

AbstractCreativity is linked to broad scope of attention, a state or trait that allocates attentional resources over a wide range of perceptual stimuli. According to the attentional priming hypothesis, a mechanism underlying the creativity–attention link is that broad perceptual attention scope primes broad conceptual attention scope—the activation of a wide range of memory contents—which therefore facilitates creative ideation. This study aimed to test the hypothesis in three experiments using three manipulations and two creativity tasks. Experiment 1 used the Navon letter task to prime attention to global patterns or local details of composite stimuli and measured creativity via the task to generate alternative uses of daily objects. Experiment 2 modified a cue‐size procedure in which participants repeatedly attended to large or small visual cues before a target stimulus appeared. Experiment 3 devised a manipulation that required participants to view and visualize images associated with broad or narrow attention and adopted the alternative uses task and the task to invent alien creatures. Across the experiments, although the results were in the predicted direction, they were non‐significant. This study found no evidence that broadness of perceptual attention affects creativity.

“I'd like to be under the sea”: Contextual cues in virtual environments influence the orientation of idea generation

Several studies have urged to explore the connections between virtual environments and creativity, both to study the processes underlying creativity and to support improved performance in creative tasks. Virtual environments, in particular, allow fine control over contextual cues present in the environment, which may serve as inspiration for creative work. However, using this potential to the fullest requires a detailed understanding of how the environment may influence creative processes. The literature suggests that contextual cues present in the environment may guide the exploration of specific categories of ideas, leading to increased originality; but also that examples of solutions – which are, undoubtedly, contextual cues themselves – may lead to reduced creativity through a conformity effect. We successively conducted two experiments in virtual environments. In the first, we manipulated the contents of the environment to prime specific concepts – water or forest – and examined the effects on creative output in a divergent thinking task. In the second experiment, we manipulated the nature of the environment and the presence or absence of examples of solutions, and examined the output of a task involving drawing alien creatures. In both experiments, the contents of environment influenced the nature of the creative output by priming specific concepts.

Far from the Tree: Choreographies of Family Obligation in the Ballet of Frankenstein

Far from the Tree: Choreographies of Family Obligation in the Ballet of Frankenstein Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (bio) Their stories point a way for all of us to expand our definitions of the human family. Intimacy with difference fosters its accommodation. —Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree Frankenstein is, like many canonical literary works, generative, traveling across time, place, and form as it is adapted to the various uses of literary narrative in the Western tradition. A story that addresses such deep human truths as Frankenstein travels extravagantly across adaptations ranging from horror movies, Halloween costumes, campy comedy, advertising, academic conferences, and now to a ballet. The dramatic story of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature extends its literary pedigree through the story of its own creation. Authored by the daughter of two famous Enlightenment intellectuals and political theorists who defined the Western liberal tradition, Frankenstein emanates from a young woman writer entangled in a semi-scandalous, theatrical liaison with one of the leading poets of nineteenth-century English Romanticism. The elaborate Gothic tale emerges from a parlor game among the avant-garde literati of the time, including the infamous Lord Byron, cooped up restlessly together on a dark and stormy night in a villa on Lake Geneva at the dawn of the European scientific revolution. Further securing Frankenstein’s narrative prestige is its gush of classical allusions, from its subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” to Ovid, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible. [End Page 464] The genre of classical ballet fits the intellectual and aesthetic aristocracy that surround the novel’s inception and the ample allusions to the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment to which the author of this story, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, was the unlikely heiress. Unlike many of the popularizations and adaptations of Frankenstein in the twentieth century—ranging across the genres of grotesque, horror, supernatural, pop, and parody—the classical ballet adaptation of the novel fits well with the elite allusions and the intellectual interests of the circle surrounding its romantic launch. Shelley’s Frankenstein reaches toward high art through a classically arranged, costumed, and staged ballet version choreographed by Liam Scarlett and performed by the Royal Ballet in 2016 and the San Francisco Ballet in 2017 and 2018.1 The Meaning-Making Possibilities of Adaptation My purpose here is threefold: first, to show what meanings emerge from the story of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature through the adaptation from novel to ballet; second, to explicate how the ballet carries story through the gestural expressive forms of classical and modern dance; and third, to offer a bioethical reading of the Frankenstein ballet as a cautionary tale about the precariousness of familial attachments when the usual expectations and familiar patterns of procreation are disturbed. The adaptation from novel to ballet, from one aesthetic genre to another, enables a story about the proper and improper relations and mutual obligations between parent and child to emerge with clarity, economy, and strength. The expressive possibilities of the dance form intensify and concentrate the Frankenstein family drama, transforming Shelley’s narratively complex Gothic plot into a succinct, stylized performance that embodies character and familial interrelations in ways the novel form and many of the subsequent adaptations obscure. A story about the ethics of family obligation materializes as Shelley’s multiple plotlines, settings, characters, and points of view condense into a series of tightly choreographed major scenes performed by principal dancers and supported by a corps de ballet.2 The introduction of the alien Creature into this highly conventional structure of expression makes flesh the spectacle of familial bonds by turns forged and sundered, claimed and renounced, restored and violated. The Frankenstein ballet tells a story of proper familial creation, belonging, recognition, and acceptance gone awry. The ballet—to use Henry James’s narrative [End Page 465] axiom—shows rather than tells the agonizing interrelations that come from parental rejection of a child who differs from the parent and from parental expectations.3 Far from the Tree Andrew Solomon, in his critically acclaimed book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, narrates the lived stories of families that understood themselves as typical or nondisabled until the entry of disabled children who...

Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman

Reviewed by: Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman Ayako Kano (bio) Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan. By Amanda C. Seaman. University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. x, 230 pages. $62.00. Amanda Seaman's Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is an informative and thought-provoking book that offers many fascinating insights into pregnancy—in both its mundane and its outlandish modes—in the last few decades in Japan. As a study of pregnancy in Japan, it joins the ethnography Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (Rutgers University Press, 2010) by Tsipy Ivry. As a study of female authors foregrounding their bodily experiences, it joins books like Seaman's own Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004) and Julia Bullock's The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction (University of Hawai'i Press, 2010). The book that most persistently calls for comparison with Seaman's, however, is Saitō Minako's Ninshin shōsetsu (Pregnancy fiction [Chikuma Shobō, 1994]), which is (in my opinion lamentably) not yet translated. Saitō's book does a masterful chopping and roasting job on canonical fiction written mostly, but not exclusively, by men, from the 1890s to the 1980s. In contrast, Seaman's deals primarily with the 1970s onward and exclusively focuses on works by women, also including works by manga artists and those blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. Thus, in terms of the oeuvre discussed, there is hardly any overlap. The two contrasting books have much to tell us about pregnancy and about writing (or drawing) pregnancy in modern and contemporary Japan. What Saitō Minako ends up doing in her satirical study, I would argue, is not to describe a subgenre of Japanese fiction but to send up the institution of canonical "modern Japanese fiction" itself, in all its masculinist glory. [End Page 385] Pregnancy turns out to be crucial to the institution of modern Japanese fiction, a secret ingredient that exposes all manner of tired tropes and stereotypes about women and men and the meaning of life. What Amanda Seaman accomplishes is something quite different. As she points out, the decades since the 1980s are ones of low fertility, in which marriage and childbirth circumscribe less and less of women's lives. The dominant figure in cultural representation of women is not that of the mother, or the pregnant woman, but that of the girl (shMjo). For example, Nobuko Anan's Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls' Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) captures the cultural visibility of the girlish figure on stage and screen. Low fertility as social reality and the prevalence of the shōjo ideal means that the pregnant woman is rarely seen, on the page or in the streets. The topic of Seaman's study then is something of a paradox. On the one hand, pregnancy continues to be a defining feature of what is understood to be a woman's life-course in social common sense and in government policy. (As I describe in my own work, Japanese Feminist Debates [University of Hawai'i Press, 2016], the basic assumption of Japanese welfare policy is that all women marry and become mothers.) Yet, on the other hand, pregnancy is increasingly absent from women's lives. There is another paradox: In Seaman's words, "pregnancy makes for great literature: there is an alien creature growing inside a woman's body, sucking the life from her, parasitical and potentially horrific. When it painfully erupts, it is demanding and all-encompassing. On the other hand, stories about pregnancy are really boring" (p. 16) because modern medical development makes gestation non-eventful and parturition usually nonhorrific. Thus, pregnancy stories tend to be dominated by "intense personal reflection on the part of the woman" (p. 16) that may be variously insightful and enlightening, but might not make for entertaining reading. This is why in the works discussed by Seaman, something usually intrudes to make the pregnancy exciting and worthy of publication. Saitō Minako points to the same problem when she notes that in fiction, all pregnancy is unwanted, or...

How to Fuck a Kraken

Recent theories in posthumanism and animal studies have shown how race, gender, and sexuality help constitute the boundaries of the human and the animal as such. This essay argues that vertebrate land animals have most frequently formed the basis for racialized human-animal comparisons and the gender-sexual paradigms that underwrite them, and proposes instead a turn to invertebrate sea animals. In speculative fiction, these alien creatures offer a more complex interface for the racialized gender and sexual registers of human-animal imaginaries. In particular, erotic monster fiction by Alice Xavier recasts the meaning of animality as a figure of the erotic by transforming octopi and anemones into nonbinary-gendered objects of human desire. If animality is a crucial figure for how humans imagine animals in order to reimagine ourselves, then Alien Seed’s fantasies about invertebrate animals create more space for trans and nonbinary genders in ways deeply entangled with the nonhuman world.

Broaden the mind before ideation: The effect of conceptual attention scope on creativity

Many theorists have argued that creativity essentially derives from associating and combining seemingly unrelated concepts; by implication, psychological factors that facilitate the association of remote concepts may be conducive to creativity. The present study attempted to test the potential effect of one of these factors, the scope of conceptual attention – defined as the range of activation of mental representations in long-term memory. Broad conceptual attention engenders activation of a wide range of memory contents simultaneously, increasing the possibility of discovering useful associations between remote concepts, thus the hypothesis was that broad conceptual attention facilitates creativity. Three experiments were conducted using two different manipulations of conceptual attention scope. Their effects on creativity shown in imagined alien creatures were observed. The results demonstrated evidence to support the hypothesis. Specifically, Experiment 1 revealed that participants who had to generate free associates to the presented categories subsequently showed higher levels of creativity than those who had to generate associates confined by category boundaries, namely exemplars of the same categories. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the effect of the manipulation on creativity and also examine its impact on analytic thinking. The results suggested that conceptual attention scope might affect creativity, but did not impact deductive reasoning. In Experiment 3, the participants whose attention was broadened by producing atypical category exemplars were more creative than those who generated typical exemplars. Overall, the findings lent support for the associative theory of creativity and similar accounts, and their practical significance is discussed in this paper.

Are There Other Earths Out There? Astronomers’ First Clues to an Answer Date Back 100 Years

Of all the questions that science might hope to answer, few excite people more than “is there life on worlds other than our Earth, and, if so, do any alien creatures possess intelligence similar to that of human beings?” But how can we find rocky Earth-like worlds that orbit around stars other than our Sun? Remarkably, the first astronomical evidence that such worlds exist dates back 100 years! This evidence involved observation of something called a “white dwarf” star, which is the type of star that our Sun will become five billion years from now. Studies of white dwarf stars have shown that rocky worlds with compositions similar to that of Earth are common throughout our Milky Way galaxy. Thus, future prospects are bright for finding rocky planets suitable for hosting life.

Meaningless words promote meaningful categorization

abstractOn traditional accounts, word meanings are entries in a mental lexicon. Nonsense words lack such entries, and are therefore meaningless. Here, we show thatunder some circumstancesnonsense words function indistinguishably from conventional words. The ‘nonsense’ wordsfooveandcrelchled participants to select systematically different clusters of adjectives and were reliably matched to different species of alien creatures (e.g., ‘crelches’ were pointy and narrow and ‘fooves’ were large and fat). In a categorization task in which participants learned to group two species of aliens primarily on the basis of roundness/pointiness, these novel labels facilitated performance as much as conventional words (e.g.,round,pointy). The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism and support a non-traditional view of word meaning according to which words do not have meanings by virtue of a conventionalized form−meaning pairing. Rather, the ‘meaning’ of a word is the effect that the word form has on the user’s mental activity.

My Outsider Art.

My Outsider Art.

Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper

AbstractT. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward's task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward's thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward's thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting.