Creativity, ambiguous figures, and academic preference

Research suggests that ambiguous figure reversal is associated with creativity, but current evidence relies on subjective self-report that is difficult to quantify (Wiseman, Watt, Gilhooly, Georgiou, 2011 British Journal of Psychology 102 615-622). Using quantifiable measures of both phenomena we confirm this claim. We also find that participants studying science experience much more frequent reversal-a novel and intriguing finding. Keywords: ambiguous figure reversal, creativity, academic preferenc

Gesture Facilitates Children’s Creative Thinking

Gestures help people think and can help offer new ideas to problem solvers. We conducted two experiments exploring the self-oriented function of gesture in a novel domain; creative thinking. In Experiment 1 we explored the relationship between children’s spontaneous gesture production and their ability to generate novel uses for everyday items (Alternative Uses Task). There was a significant correlation between children’s creative fluency and their gesture production, with the majority of children’s gestures depicting an action upon the target object. Restricting children from gesturing did not significantly reduce their fluency. In Experiment 2 we encouraged children to gesture and this significantly boosted their creative idea generation. These findings demonstrate that gestures serve an important self-oriented function and can assist creative thinking

Imagination links with schizotypal beliefs, not with creativity or learning

Imagination refers to creating mental representations of concepts, ideas, and sensations that are not contemporaneously perceived by the senses. Although it is key to human individuality, research on imagination is scarce. To address this gap, we developed here a new psychometric test to assess individual differences in imagination and explored the role of imagination for learning, creativity, and schizotypal beliefs. In a laboratory-based (N = 180) and an online study (N = 128), we found that imagination is only weakly associated with learning achievement and creativity, accounting for 2–8% of the variance. By contrast, imagination accounted for 22.5% of the variance in schizotypal beliefs, suggesting overall that imagination may be more indicative of cognitive eccentricities rather than benefit the accumulation of knowledge or production of novel and useful ideas

The Construction and Validation of an Arithmetical Computation Test

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67909/2/10.1177_001316445301300206.pd

Designing creative spaces: An experimental examination of the effect of a nature poster on divergent thinking

This paper reports the results of an independent samples experiment designed to examine the effects of the presence of a large poster depicting a natural woodland scene on individual performance on two Divergent Thinking tasks. In comparison to the no-poster control condition, the presentation of a large poster depicting a nature scene was found to lead to greater levels of creativity as rated by judges who were blind to the experimental design. The effects of the large poster on Divergent Thinking were found to hold when controlling for Openness-to-Experience and Mood. Exploratory analyses of participant ratings of room characteristics indicated that the mechanism underlying the posters’ effect related to elevated stimulation

The Factor Analysis of Ipsative Measures

This article deals with the problem of analyzing sets of ipsative variables using the common factor model. We demonstrate that the usual assumptions of the common factor model, especially the assumption of uncorrelated disturbances, are not appropriate for sets of ipsative variables. We develop a common factor model that takes into account the ipsative properties of such data and show how this model can be applied to any set of ipsative measures using the methods of confirmatory factor analysis. We then suggest that the application of this model may be useful in modeling the latent content of sets ofrankings and other measures that have the ipsative property as a result of the measurement procedure. Finally, we apply the model to Kohn's measures of parental values, using sample data from the General Social Surveys.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68736/2/10.1177_004912418000900206.pd