Thinking Tasks Research Articles

Effects of stimulant medication on divergent and convergent thinking tasks related to creativity in adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Common pharmacological treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are central nervous system stimulants acting as norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitors. The noradrenergic and dopaminergic systems have been shown to impact performance on tasks assessing creativity. Some previous studies suggest higher performance on creativity tasks in ADHD. Stimulant medication has been shown to differentially impact creativity in those without ADHD. However, the full range of effects of stimulant medication on creativity in those with ADHD is not known. This study examined the effects of stimulants on convergent and divergent tasks associated with creativity in adults with ADHD. Seventeen adults diagnosed with ADHD who were prescribed stimulant medication attended two counterbalanced sessions: one after taking their prescribed stimulant dose and one after the dose was withheld. Participants completed convergent problem-solving (anagrams, Compound Remote Associates) and divergent generative (letter/semantic fluency, Torrance Test for Creative Thinking (TTCT)-Verbal) tasks. There was a significant increase in words generated on the semantic fluency task for the stimulant session. Additionally, significant increases were found in the stimulant session for originality, flexibility, and fluency scores on the TTCT. Stimulant medication did not have an effect on any of the problem-solving tasks. Stimulant medication enhanced verbal fluency in adults with ADHD but had no effect on convergent abilities. Furthermore, stimulants enhanced fluency, flexibility, and originality scores on the TTCT. Therefore, stimulants appear to have positive effects on divergent task performance in adults with ADHD, but not convergent tasks. This finding warrants further studies into the specific roles of norepinephrine and dopamine in this effect.

The contribution Openness to Experience and its two aspects to the explanation of idea generation, evaluation and selection: A metacognitive perspective

This investigation is part of a line of research examining the implications of Openness to Experience for creative metacognition. We assessed the relationships between Openness to Experience and its two aspects and idea generation, evaluation and selection, using a metacognitive approach. In studies 1 and 2, participants completed a battery of questionnaires assessing Openness to Experience, demographic questions and a divergent thinking task. In addition, participants were asked to report strengths and weaknesses for their ideas and select the most creative idea. Independent raters evaluated the creativity of each idea, the relevance of the identified strengths and weaknesses and selected the most creative idea for each participant. Results showed a consistent, positive relationship between Openness to Experience and creative scores and relevance of strengths and weaknesses identified. In study 1, Openness made a significant, additional contribution to creative scores while controlling for Openness to Experience. Conversely, in study 2, Intellect made an additional contribution to relevance of strengths and weaknesses. Overall, results from our measurement model showed that Openness to Experience explained between 54 and 67% of the total variance, leaving a significant amount of residual variance in part explained by Openness and Intellect.

Drinking tea improves the convergent creativity performance

Tea consumption has been extensively shown to be closely related to physical health and cognitive abilities. However, there are no definite conclusions on the relationship between tea consumption and convergent thinking. Convergent thinking requires top-down cognitive processing, which focuses on searching for an appropriate idea based on well-defined criteria. It is a necessary part of the creative process and is inextricably linked to divergent thinking that requires people to search for many different ideas with less defined criteria within a wider search span. It has been found that tea consumption is beneficial to divergent thinking in creativity. Given that convergent thinking is related to divergent thinking, we hypothesized that drinking tea may also promote convergent thinking. This research was to investigate the enhancing effects of tea on convergent thinking and test its possible mediating mechanism (i.e., the role of positive emotions) and marginal conditions (e.g., the moderating roles of intelligence and tea preference). In Experiment 1, participants completed the Remote Association Test (RAT) which requires the solver to create a meaningful link (word association) that mediates three seemingly unrelated cues (e.g., Same–Tennis–Head is mediated by Match) after drinking tea or water. The results showed that the type of drinks and tea consumption habits had a significant interaction effect on RAT scores. The participants who drank tea (v.s. water) and had the habit of drinking tea performed best in the RAT. A “split half effect” was found. That is, participants' performance in different groups was significantly different in the second half of the RAT, suggesting that drinking tea leads to persistent problem-solving convergent thinking. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the findings in Experiment 1 using a different convergent thinking task, namely, riddle tasks, where participants needed to solve riddles with different levels of difficulty. The results revealed that performance in the tea group on the difficult tasks was significantly higher than that in the water group; after controlling for knowledge level and intelligence, the differences in the performance in the medium- and high-difficulty riddle tasks between the two groups were significant. Although no experiments found a mediating effect of positive emotions, Experiment 2 showed that the participants in the tea group were happier and more interested in the task than those in the water group. To conclude, the positive effects of tea drinking on convergent thinking was demonstrated, and the moderating effects of knowledge level, intelligence, and tea drinking habits were elaborated. The results have important practical significance for those who are engaged in creative work or those who are prone to fatigue.

Examining the episodic-semantic interaction during future thinking - A reanalysis of external details.

While traditional analyses of autobiographical construction tend to focus on the 'internal' or episodic details of the narrative, contemporary studies employing fine-grained scoring measures reveal the 'external' component to contain important information relevant to the individual's life story. Here, we used the recently developed NExt scoring protocol to explore profiles of external details generated by patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (n = 11) and semantic dementia (SD) (n = 13) on a future thinking task. Overall, distinct NExt profiles were observed for future events in AD and SD. Specifically, AD patients provided significantly more Specific Episode external details compared with Controls. Using voxel-based morphometry, these increased external details within future narratives related to grey matter intensity in medial and lateral frontal regions in AD. By contrast, SD patients displayed an elevation of Specific Episode, Extended Episode, and General Semantic details during future simulation relative to Controls, which related to grey matter intensity of medial and lateral parietal regions. Our findings suggest that the compensatory external details generated during future simulation comprise an array of episodic and semantic details that vary in terms of specificity and self-relevance, which may be differentially affected depending on the locus of underlying neuropathology in dementia. Adopting a fine-grained approach to external details helps to characterise the interplay between episodic and semantic content during future stimulation and suggests potentially differential vulnerability and preservation of distinct components of the constructed narrative in clinical disorders.

Children's divergent thinking and bilingualism

Most children in the world grow up bilingual, and bilingualism has been linked to a range of linguistic and other cognitive skills. One such skill is creativity, which is thought could be increased in bilinguals due to enhanced executive functions or more diverse cultural experiences. However, extant literature with children has produced mixed results, perhaps due to methodological limitations. In this study, bilingual and monolingual children (N = 111, 60% bilingual) sampled from the same British schools completed three measures of divergent thinking, alongside measures of nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, and exposure to English. No differences were found between monolingual and bilingual children across any of the divergent thinking tasks or measures, either before or after controlling for possible confounds, and effect sizes were negligible to small. This well-powered, pre-registered study provides no evidence for a bilingual advantage in the divergent thinking component of creativity amongst children, suggesting that previous mixed results may have been due to a high prevalence of false positives. Thus, while bilingualism has many benefits for children, divergent thinking is not one of them.

Spaces for Creativity: The Role of Physical Environment in Creative Problem Solving

Previous literature has studied how the physical space influences organizational processes and outcomes, and recent studies have delved deeper into this topic by examining the impact of organizational decisions such as relocating offices, reconfiguring into open-office layouts, and adopting flexible seating arrangements. However, the literature has often overlooked the role that the actual visual features of physical space could have on organizational members’ behaviors or performance in important areas such as creativity. We investigate whether a visually stimulating physical environment (as a whole) has a causal effect on individual-level creativity. Specifically, we study how two contrasting physical spaces (visually “quiet” vs. visually stimulating spaces) influence the two most widely recognized types of creative thinking—convergent and divergent creative thinking. Taking a controlled experiment approach, we randomly assigned 116 participants to either a visually “quiet” or visually stimulating space and asked them to solve a convergent or divergent creative thinking task. We found that participants performed better in the convergent creative thinking task in the visually stimulating space and that participants performed better in the divergent creative thinking task in the visually “quiet” space. The implications of our findings for organization designers challenge the wide-spread belief that creative workspaces with many visual stimuli serve as silver bullets for fostering creative problem solving.

A novel coding scheme for assessing responses in divergent thinking: An embodied approach.

In the present study we devised a novel coding scheme for responses generated in a divergent thinking task. Based on considerations from behavioural and neurocognitive research from an embodied perspective, our scheme aims to capture dimensions of simulations of action or the body. In an exploratory investigation, we applied our novel coding scheme to analyze responses from a previously published dataset of divergent thinking responses. We show that a) these dimensions are reliably coded by naïve raters, and that b) individual differences in creativity influences the way in which different dimensions are used over time. Overall, our results provide new hypotheses about the generation of creative response in the divergent thinking task and should serve to characterize the cognitive strategies used in creative endeavors.

Interdependencies between openness and creativity of fifth graders.

Openness to experience has become of special interest in the field of creativity research. Theoretical frameworks consider openness as one important individual feature that contributes to creative outcomes. Empirical results support this assumption, showing openness to be positively related to various creativity measures. However, studies on the relationship between creative outcomes and openness mainly focus on adults and differ in their operationalization of creativity. The present study analyzes the relationship between openness and different creativity measures in late childhood using a holistic measure to assess creative potential as well as divergent thinking tasks scored for ideational fluency and flexibility. Accounting for interdependencies over the 5th school year, the results show that (a) comparable with previous findings, there are low cross-sectional correlations between openness and creativity, and (b) openness and creativity develop independently in the period considered. Only divergent thinking slightly affects openness 1 year later (β = .084, p < .01). The study extends existing research by including childhood development. The results suggest that the relationship between creativity and openness consolidates with age. Implications for creativity research and the educational context are discussed while considering the limitations of the study. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Fostering post-secondary vocational students’ critical thinking through multi-level tasks in learning environments

In today’s labour market, being competitive requires, in addition to technical skills, several twenty-first-century career competencies, including the capacity to think critically. Although the literature on teaching methods designed for enhancing students’ reflective thinking abounds, the contribution of special tasks with varying complexity to learners’ critical thinking capacity, to our knowledge, has not been earlier investigated. Hence, the present investigation sought to investigate the effect of multi-level critical thinking activities introduced into classes on the critical thinking level of post-secondary vocational students. This cross-sectional study employed the Starkey Critical Thinking Test adapted for the Russian-speaking population in order to measure critical thinking level in a sample (n = 218) of vocational students. Results showed that among students whose classes were complemented by critical thinking tasks, almost half of subjects with low and test scores eventually shifted to a medium scoring cohort. Eleven learners who were medium scorers at the beginning gained high-level results at the end point. Meanwhile, only a small percentage of those no-treatment participants with initially low performance on the critical thinking test eventually moved into the medium level, as well as from the latter into a high achievement category. The independent two-tailed t-test revealed a significant difference between posttest scores observed in control and intervention groups. It can be therefore suggested that critical analysis of thought-provoking materials with subsequent class presentation and discussion can provide catalytic conditions for developing learners’ reflective thinking abilities. It was recommended that future studies using similar intervention should involve a larger sample and deal with qualitative data to extend the research and increase its validity.&#x0D; &#x0D; Keywords: Education; higher-order thinking; reflective thinking; vocational students.

The Impact of SRA-Programming on Computational Thinking in a Visual Oriented Programming Environment

Visual programming environments are popular instruments in teaching Computational Thinking (CT) in schools today. Applying Sense-Reason-Act (SRA) programming can influence the development of computational thinking when forcing pupils to anticipate the unforeseen in their computer programs. SRA-programming originates from the programming of tangible robots, but can also be of equal value in visual programming with on-screen output. The underlying rationale is that programming in a visual programming environment using SRA leads to more understanding of the computational concepts addressed, resulting in a higher level of computational skill compared to visual programming without the application of SRA. Furthermore, it has been hypothesised that if pupils in a visual programming environment can anticipate unforeseen events and solve programming tasks by applying SRA, they will be better able to solve complex computational thinking tasks. To establish if characteristic differences in the development of computational thinking can be measured when SRA-programming is applied in a visual programming environment with an on-screen output, we assessed the applicability of SRA-programming with visual output as the main component of the execution of developed code. This research uses a pre-test post-test design that reveals significant differences in the development of computational thinking in two treatment conditions. To assess CT, the Computational Thinking Test (CTt) was used. Results show that when using SRA-programming in a visual programming environment it leads to an increased understanding of complex computational concepts, which results in a significant increase in the development of computational thinking.

Stay at home! When personality profiles influence mental health and creativity during the COVID-19 lockdown.

With the COVID-19 outbreak, the population was suddenly forced to “stay at home”. Although research suggests that social isolation affects health and wellbeing, reactions may vary depending on individuals. The current study assessed the relationships between personality variables (preference for solitude and Big Five personality), mental health (anxiety, stress, loneliness), and creativity, and tried to determine whether the identified personality profiles affect individuals’ mental health and creativity. French respondents (N = 430) filled in an online questionnaire during the first lockdown in Spring 2020. The results showed that the preference for solitude and personality variables of the Big Five predicted individuals’ mental health and creativity. Moreover, a cluster analysis revealed three profiles of individuals: “Affiliation”, “Emotionally Stable Lonely” and “Emotionally Unstable Lonely”. Results showed that individuals with “Affiliation” and “Emotionally Unstable Lonely” profiles expressed higher stress and anxiety, and the latter performed better on a divergent creative thinking task. By contrast, those with an “Emotionally Stable Lonely” profile expressed a lower level of loneliness, and performed better on a creative insight task. These findings reveal the importance of personality profiles in psychological reactions during lockdowns. With this knowledge, health professionals could develop appropriate interventions to accompany high-risk individuals in situations of social isolation.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-021-01885-3.

Be real, open, and creative: How openness to experience and to change mediate the authenticity-creativity association

Although several researchers have suggested that authenticity fosters individuals’ creativity, few empirical studies have focused on this research topic, and even fewer have examined the underlying mechanism. To address this gap, this study examined the relationships among authenticity, openness to experience, openness to change, and creativity. Three hundred Chinese participants (246 women, mean age = 20.36 years) were recruited via an online survey website and they were asked to complete the Authenticity Scale, the Openness to Experience Scale, the Routine Seeking Scale (i.e., as a measure of openness to change), the Creative Behavior Scale, and two divergent thinking tasks (i.e., the alternative uses task, AUT). The results revealed positive associations among all the variables of interest (i.e., authenticity, openness to experience, openness to change, self-reported creative behavior, AUT fluency, AUT originality, and AUT flexibility). Moreover, both openness to experience and to change fully mediated the association between authenticity and self-reported creative behavior, AUT fluency, and AUT flexibility. In addition, openness to experience fully mediated the link between authenticity and AUT originality. The results highlight the mediating role of openness as a mechanism that underlies the association between authenticity and creativity. Therefore, developing an authentic mindset or increasing individuals’ propensity to openness could be considered possible ways to stimulate their creative potential/performance. The limitations of this study and future directions are discussed in detail.

How reliable and valid are frequency-based originality scores? Evidence from a sample of children and adolescents

Creativity—as any other object of scientific endeavor—requires a sound measurement that adheres to quality criteria. For decades, creativity science has been criticized as falling short in developing valid and reliable measures of creative potential, activity, and achievement. Recent years have witnessed growth of theoretical and empirical works that focused on improving creativity assessment. Here, we apply one of such recently developed approaches based on item response theory to examine ideas’ and person score reliability in a divergent thinking task. A large sample (N = 621) of children and adolescents solved the Circles task from Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking-Figural and two other figural tests measuring creative thinking (Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Production) and creative imagination (Test of Creative Imagery Abilities). By employing response propensity models, we observed that separate ideas’ reliability tended to fall below recommended thresholds (even liberal ones, e.g., 0.60) unless the sample size as well as the number of generated ideas (fluency) were large. Importantly, reliability at the idea-level affected reliability at the person-level much less than could be assumed based on recent findings. We propose a systematic perspective on divergent thinking assessment that considers responses as nested in tasks and tasks as nested in tests. Finally, we recommend that adding more tasks to divergent thinking tests might increase reliability at the test-level.

Functional Realignment of Frontoparietal Subnetworks during Divergent Creative Thinking.

Creative cognition has been consistently associated with functional connectivity between frontoparietal control and default networks. However, recent research identified distinct connectivity dynamics for subnetworks within the larger frontoparietal system-one subnetwork (FPCNa) shows positive coupling with the default network and another subnetwork (FPCNb) shows negative default coupling-raising questions about how these networks interact during creative cognition. Here we examine frontoparietal subnetwork functional connectivity in a large sample of participants (n = 171) who completed a divergent creative thinking task and a resting-state scan during fMRI. We replicated recent findings on functional connectivity of frontoparietal subnetworks at rest: FPCNa positively correlated with the default network and FPCNb negatively correlated with the default network. Critically, we found that divergent thinking evoked functional connectivity between both frontoparietal subnetworks and the default network, but in different ways. Using community detection, we found that FPCNa regions showed greater coassignment to a default network community. However, FPCNb showed overall stronger functional connectivity with the default network-reflecting a reversal of negative connectivity at rest-and the strength of FPCNb-default network connectivity correlated with individual creative ability. These findings provide novel evidence of a behavioral benefit to the cooperation of typically anticorrelated brain networks.

Intelligence and creativity share a common cognitive and neural basis.

Are intelligence and creativity distinct abilities, or do they rely on the same cognitive and neural systems? We sought to quantify the extent to which intelligence and creative cognition overlap in brain and behavior by combining machine learning of fMRI data and latent variable modeling of cognitive ability data in a sample of young adults (N = 186) who completed a battery of intelligence and creative thinking tasks. The study had 3 analytic goals: (a) to assess contributions of specific facets of intelligence (e.g., fluid and crystallized intelligence) and general intelligence to creative ability (i.e., divergent thinking originality), (b) to model whole-brain functional connectivity networks that predict intelligence facets and creative ability, and (c) to quantify the degree to which these predictive networks overlap in the brain. Using structural equation modeling, we found moderate to large correlations between intelligence facets and creative ability, as well as a large correlation between general intelligence and creative ability (r = .63). Using connectome-based predictive modeling, we found that functional brain networks that predict intelligence facets overlap to varying degrees with a network that predicts creative ability, particularly within the prefrontal cortex of the executive control network. Notably, a network that predicted general intelligence shared 46% of its functional connections with a network that predicted creative ability-including connections linking executive control and salience/ventral attention networks-suggesting that intelligence and creative thinking rely on similar neural and cognitive systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Does design thinking training increase creativity? Results from a field experiment with middle-school students

ABSTRACT Design thinking remains mired in controversy. Its proponents claim that it enhances not just confidence but also creativity, while the opponents question whether it does anything beyond building unfounded confidence. To bring rigorous evidence to this debate, we designed a randomised field experiment amongst school children served by a major non-governmental organisation in rural India. The findings reveal that the design thinking training did not just increase confidence: it also significantly increased ideational fluency and elaboration in a divergent thinking task, although the originality and flexibility of the generated ideas was on average lower in the treatment group than the control group. We also find that the increase in confidence occurred primarily among female students, whereas the increase in ideational fluency and elaboration occurred for both genders in our study.

Examining the impact of children’s exploration behaviors on creativity

Creativity is typically measured using divergent thinking tasks where participants are asked to generate multiple responses following a prompt. However, being able to generate responses captures only a partial picture of creativity. Convergent thinking, in which a single solution is chosen, is an equally important part of creativity that is often left out of divergent thinking assessments. Moreover, as the field of creativity evolves, exploration is starting to be recognized as an understudied component of how children generate and apply creative solutions. The current study moved beyond typical divergent thinking tasks and examined a measure of creativity that also captured 4- to 6-year-old children’s convergent thinking and exploration behaviors. A total of 130 children participated in a creative problem-solving task where they were asked to remove a ball from a jar using everyday objects. Children’s actions were coded as divergent thinking, convergent thinking, or exploration behaviors. Results demonstrated that divergent and convergent thinking performance was not associated with success on the task, indicating that simply generating and selecting more responses is not always enough to achieve a creative outcome. Children’s exploration behaviors were positively associated with success on the task. Exploration behaviors were more likely to lead to success if they were purposeful and iterative. These findings provide some of the first evidence that children’s exploration is a vital component of creativity.

Foraging for New Ideas: Search and Research in Divergent Thinking Tasks

ABSTRACT More than 50 years since the introduction of the concept of divergent production, little progress has been made in the development of parsimonious theoretical models that sufficiently explain creativity. Recently, the optimal foraging theory has been used to explain the search for items in memory tasks, suggesting the correspondence between the ability to search in a real environment and cognitive search as an essential part of cognitive models. However, the relationship between external search and divergent thinking tasks has not been empirically tested. Eight hundred and fifty-nine children were evaluated through tasks that require the visual or semantic search of information. A confirmatory factor analysis model showed that several models presented good adjustment indices. The best fit presented was a model of two latent independent factors and a general first-order factor that shows that external search and divergent thinking tasks share common mechanisms. This data empirically supports the theoretical development of the concept of divergent production under a novel empirical and evolutionary perspective that relates divergent thinking with the external and internal exploratory capacity.

Gender characteristics of primary school students’ success in solving tasks in the context of varying extrinsic motivational attitudes

The article presents the results of an empirical study of specific characteristics of the success of boys and girls of primary school age in solving convergent problems under the condition of varying motivational attitudes. The study was conducted in the elementary school of the State Budgetary Educational Institution of Moscow “School No. 1561” educational complex in 2016-2018. The study sample includes 239 second-grade students the average age of whom was 8.2 years old. 137 of the study participants were boys and 102 were girls which constitutes 57% and 43% of the sample, respectively. Motivation is assessed via the authors’ modification of N.V. Elfimova’s method “A ladder of motives”, a version of M. Seligman’s Children’s Attributional Style Questionnaire (CASQ) modified by N.A. Baturina and D.A. Tsiring, and the authors’ modification of C. Dweck’s Implicit Theory Scale. The study of the cognitive sphere of the primary school students involves J. Raven’s progressive matrices test, P. Torrance’s test of creative thinking, and E.E. Tunik’s adaptation of J. Johnson’s creativity scale. Within the framework of the experiment, two blocks of convergent tasks are formed: one including non-verbal transitivity tasks (the logical block) and the other containing volumetric and spatial thinking tasks (the spatial block). It is established that the success of primary school students of both sexes in solving convergent tasks is associated not only with the extrinsic motivational attitude constructed through verbal instruction but also with the specific psychological characteristics of the development of the cognitive and motivational spheres in children. The relationship between the success in solving convergent tasks and the psychological characteristics of cognitive development and the motivational sphere differs for boys and girls of primary school age which manifests most intensely in the level of development of the non-verbal component, the leading motivation, and the specifics of the development of the attributional style of explaining success and failure, as well as its particular components.

Tomorrow will be different: Children's ability to incorporate an intervening event when thinking about the future.

Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved based solely on representations of the present. To overcome this limitation, we modified an existing task such that children could not simply rely on a representation of the present to succeed (i.e., the correct answer for "right now" was different than the correct answer for "tomorrow"). A sample of 117 4- to 7-year-olds (64 girls and 53 boys) from Ottawa, Canada, and surrounding area, who were predominantly European Canadian (78.6% of sample) and had a family income of over $100,000 CAN (66.1% of sample) participated. Children remembered the information required to solve our task, and there were age-related changes in performance, but only 7-year-olds made an adaptive future-oriented decision significantly more often than chance. With the task modification removed (so the correct answer for the present and the future was the same), even 4-year-olds were above chance. Our work challenges the notion that starting at age 4, children solve behavioral tasks of future thinking by acting on their representations of the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).