Psychological evaluation of creativity in artwork

Angeregt durch neue Veröffentlichungen der Kreativitätsforschung, die zwischen den schöpferischen Leistungen verschiedener Disziplinen nicht unterscheiden, wurde in dieser Studie die Frage gestellt, ob der TSD-Z von Urban und Jellen (1993) als Screeninginstrument zur ersten Grobeinschätzung kreativen Potentials zwischen Künstlern und Personen aus nichtkünstlerischen Berufen differenzieren kann. Darüber hinaus wurden Kriterien erhoben, welche die als Testergebnis gewonnenen Zeichnungen in ihrer Gesamtkomposition auswerteten, und zwar hinsichtlich Abstraktheit, Einmaligkeit und Wohnlichkeit/Idylle. Für zwei gleich große Gruppen (N = 60) ergab sich, daß der TSD-Z (A) in erwarteter Richtung zwischen den beiden Gruppen zu unterscheiden vermag, wobei die Künstlergruppe in der Testsumme des TSD-Z (A) nur durch einige wenige Kriterien zu einer höheren Punktzahl gelangte. Die Varianzen der Ergebnisse der Künstlergruppe lagen in fast allen Bewertungskategorien über denen der Kontrollgruppe. Zusätzlich konnten mit einer Faktorenanalyse die für künstlerische Kreativität relevanten Skalen des TSD-Z isoliert werden. In allen drei Kriterien zur Gesamtkomposition der Bilder unterschieden sich die Gruppen signifikant. Die Künstlergruppe zeichnete häufiger abstrakte, einmalige und seltener wohnlich-idyllische Bilder. Weiterhin lagen die Testsummenwerte der abstrakt gezeichneten Künstlerbilder im Mittelwertsvergleich signifikant unter denen der gegenständlichen Zeichnungen derselben Gruppe, was als Tendenz des Tests gewertet wurde, mehr Punkte für mehr Produktion zu vergeben. Die Ergebnisse werden mit Blick auf zukünftige Untersuchungen zur Erfassung künstlerischer Kreativität diskutiert.Spurred on by the recent publications on creatvity research, which do not differentiate between the various aspects of creative achievements, the question was raised in this study, whether a new screening-instrument developed by Urban and Jellen (1993) is capable of roughly discerning a difference in creative potential between artists and non-artistis. Futhermore, the overall composition of the drawings obtained from the test was evaluated in respect to abstractness, uniqueness, and comfort/idyll. As predicted there was a significant difference between the two groups (N = 2 x 30). Moreover, the artistic group scored higher on some fewer scales of the TSD-Z (A). The variance of the results in the artistic group exceeded those of the control group in almost all rating categories. A Principal Component Analysis revealed the scales concerning artistic creativity in the TSD-Z. All three criteria for overall composition resulted in a considerable difference between the two groups. The artistic group drew significantly more abstract, unique and significantly fewer idyllic pictures. Furtermore the test scores from pictures drawn in the abstract by artists lay significantly lower than the concrete pictures of the same group. This was interpreted as a tendency of the test to score higher for drawing more. Results have been discussed with regard to the future studies in understanding artistic creativity

Global trait:environment relationships of plant communities

Abstract Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key question is to what extent community-level trait composition is globally filtered and how well it is related to global versus local environmental drivers. Here, we perform a global, plot-level analysis of trait–environment relationships, using a database with more than 1.1 million vegetation plots and 26,632 plant species with trait information. Although we found a strong filtering of 17 functional traits, similar climate and soil conditions support communities differing greatly in mean trait values. The two main community trait axes that capture half of the global trait variation (plant stature and resource acquisitiveness) reflect the trade-offs at the species level but are weakly associated with climate and soil conditions at the global scale. Similarly, within-plot trait variation does not vary systematically with macro-environment. Our results indicate that, at fine spatial grain, macro-environmental drivers are much less important for functional trait composition than has been assumed from floristic analyses restricted to co-occurrence in large grid cells. Instead, trait combinations seem to be predominantly filtered by local-scale factors such as disturbance, fine-scale soil conditions, niche partitioning and biotic interactions

sPlot:a new tool for global vegetation analyses

Abstract Aims: Vegetation‐plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co‐occurring in the same community. Vegetation‐plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level. Results: sPlot version 2.1 contains records from 1,121,244 vegetation plots, which comprise 23,586,216 records of plant species and their relative cover or abundance in plots collected worldwide between 1885 and 2015. We complemented the information for each plot by retrieving climate and soil conditions and the biogeographic context (e.g., biomes) from external sources, and by calculating community‐weighted means and variances of traits using gap‐filled data from the global plant trait database TRY. Moreover, we created a phylogenetic tree for 50,167 out of the 54,519 species identified in the plots. We present the first maps of global patterns of community richness and community‐weighted means of key traits. Conclusions: The availability of vegetation plot data in sPlot offers new avenues for vegetation analysis at the global scale