The impact of boredom on creativity in the classroom

How does engagement impact creativity in the classroom? In general, engagement with lessons is widely regarded as the goal of an educational set-up. Engagement is generally associated with positive emotions, which some work has suggested promotes creativity (e.g., de Rooij & Vromans, 2018). Thus, one might expect engagement to lead to greater creativity. Boredom, however, induced better performance in divergent-thinking tasks in adults (Mann & Caldman, 2013): adults who had been asked to copy numbers from a phone book came up with more creative uses for two plastic cups. Boredom puts learners in a state in which they require stimulation, and thus the deprivation triggers them to generate that needed stimulation through thought and imagination (e.g., Brisset & Snow, 1993; Hebb, 1996; Fisher, 1993; Kierkegaard, 1843). Despite the popularity of both notions, little work has sought to uncover a unified theory of how exactly engagement or the lack of it might work to contribute to creativity and imagination. Further, no work has examined how engagement in the classroom impacts creativity in school-aged children in the classroom. Could this boredom-induced boost to creativity observed in adults be strategically employed to induce heightened creativity in grade-schooled children? While it is possible, it remains untested. Bored adults expressed more divergent thinking, but we do not yet know if bored children would behave similarly. Adolescents emotional volatility is one factor that could change the outcome, for example. Though bored adults were creative, they also reliably associate boredom with a range of negative feelings, including stress, misery, frustration, and lethargy (Mann, 2006; Martin et al, 2006). These negative feelings have previously been associated with negative performance outcomes in adults, including poor work performance (Drory, 1982; Vodanovich, 2003) and absenteeism (Brisset & Snow, 1993). Further, arousal and emotional valence are known to interact in their impact on creativity in adults (Tidikis, Ash, & Collier, 2017). Since emotions are heightened throughout adolescents, the emotional experience of boredom may interact with the state itself in impacting changes in creativity. Boredom is a common experience throughout school. Its ubiquity makes it vital to understand in the interest of maximizing children's intellectual potential. We aim to conduct the first study of boredom on creativity in grade-school children. Previous studies of classroom disengagement have focused on harm to specific learning outcomes. Ours, by contrast, may show how disengagement could be leveraged towards a different end, in the interest of promoting innovation in the classroom. PI Celeste Kidd's group (UC Berkeley, www.kiddlab.com) has studied the cognitive mechanisms (including engagement) that govern learning throughout development, starting in infancy, using a combination of computational and behavioral methods. Co-PI Jennifer Symonds' group (University College Dublin) has previously studied the impact of boredom on children's learning, recently using a mundane English grammar exercise from the 1980's to induce boredom. Their combined skill set is ideal for this quantitative experimental proposal on creativity induction in the classroom. may be able to increase creative thinking. Any outcome, however, will be useful towards understanding how engagement impacts creativity

Using fNIRS to examine occipital and temporal responses to stimulus repetition in young infants: Evidence of selective frontal cortex involvement

How does the developing brain respond to recent experience? Repetition suppression (RS) is a robust and well-characterized response of to recent experience found, predominantly, in the perceptual cortices of the adult brain. We use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate how perceptual (temporal and occipital) and frontal cortices in the infant brain respond to auditory and visual stimulus repetitions (spoken words and faces). In Experiment 1, we find strong evidence of repetition suppression in the frontal cortex but only for auditory stimuli. In perceptual cortices, we find only suggestive evidence of auditory RS in the temporal cortex and no evidence of visual RS in any ROI. In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicate and extend these findings. Overall, we provide the first evidence that infant and adult brains respond differently to stimulus repetition. We suggest that the frontal lobe may support the development of RS in perceptual cortices

Emergence of certainty representations for guiding concept learning

Previous research has shown that our subjective sense of certainty doesn't always accurately reflect the strength of the evidence that has been presented to us. We investigate several key factors that drive children's certainty using a Boolean concept learning task. We created an idealized learning model to predict children's accuracy and certainty during the experiment, given past evidence that they have seen in the task, and we compared its predictions with our behavioral results. Our results suggest that while predictors from the idealized learning model capture children's accuracy, behavioral predictors generated by the behavioral data can better predict children's certainty. We also show that younger children's certainty can be explained by the idealized learning model, while older children's certainty is primarily predicted by how well they observed themselves doing in the experiment

Methodology for high-yield acquisition of functional near-infrared spectroscopy data from alert, upright infants

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research to date has tended to publish group-averaged rather than individual infant data due to normative basic research goals. Acquisition of individual infant time courses holds interest, however, both for cognitive science and particularly for clinical applications. Infants are more difficult to study than adults as they cannot be instructed to remain still. In addressing this, upright infants pose several associated complications for the researcher. We identified and optimized the factors that affect the quality of fNIRS data from individual 6- to 9-month-old infants exposed to a visual stimulation paradigm. The fNIRS headpiece was reconfigured to reduce inertia, increase comfort, and improve conformity to the head, while preserving fiber density to avoid missing the visual cortex activation. The visual-stimulation protocol was modified to keep the attention of infants throughout the measurement, thus helping to reduce motion artifacts. Adequate optical contact was verified by checking power levels before each measurement. By revising our experimental process and our data rejection criteria to prioritize good optical contact, we report for the first time usable hemodynamic data from 83% of infants and that two-thirds of infants produced a statistically significant fNIRS response

Methodology for high-yield acquisition of functional near-infrared spectroscopy data from alert, upright infants

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research to date has tended to publish group-averaged rather than individual infant data due to normative basic research goals. Acquisition of individual infant time courses holds interest, however, both for cognitive science and particularly for clinical applications. Infants are more difficult to study than adults as they cannot be instructed to remain still. In addressing this, upright infants pose several associated complications for the researcher. We identified and optimized the factors that affect the quality of fNIRS data from individual 6- to 9-month-old infants exposed to a visual stimulation paradigm. The fNIRS headpiece was reconfigured to reduce inertia, increase comfort, and improve conformity to the head, while preserving fiber density to avoid missing the visual cortex activation. The visual-stimulation protocol was modified to keep the attention of infants throughout the measurement, thus helping to reduce motion artifacts. Adequate optical contact was verified by checking power levels before each measurement. By revising our experimental process and our data rejection criteria to prioritize good optical contact, we report for the first time usable hemodynamic data from 83% of infants and that two-thirds of infants produced a statistically significant fNIRS response