Thought
The creative cliff illusion
Brian Lucas & Loran Nordgren
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 18 August 2020, Pages 19830-19836
Abstract:
Across eight studies, we tested whether people understand the time course of their own creativity. Prior literature finds that creativity tends to improve across an ideation session. Here we compared people’s beliefs against their actual creative performance. Consistent with prior research, we found that people’s creativity, on aggregate, remained constant or improved across an ideation session. However, people’s beliefs did not match this reality. We consistently found that people expected their creativity to decline over time. We refer to this misprediction as the creative cliff illusion. Study 1 found initial evidence of this effect across an ideation task. We found further evidence in a sample with high domain-relevant knowledge (study 2), when creativity judgments were elicited retrospectively (study 3), and across a multiday study (study 5). We theorized the effect occurs because people mistakenly associate creativity (the novelty and usefulness of an idea) with idea production (the ability to generate an idea). Study 4 found evidence consistent with this mechanism. The creative cliff illusion was attenuated among those with high levels of everyday creative experience (study 6) and after a knowledge intervention that increased awareness of the effect (study 7). Demonstrating the impact of creativity beliefs on downstream performance, study 8 found that declining creativity beliefs negatively influenced task persistence and creative performance, suggesting that people underinvest in ideation. This research contributes to work on prediction in the creative domain and demonstrates the importance of understanding creativity beliefs for predicting creative performance.
Genetic and epigenetic serotonergic markers predict the ability to recognize mental states
Martin Reuter et al.
Physiology & Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The serotonergic (5-HT) system is related to affective and cognitive processes and explains behavioral variability in the normal and psychopathological range. For this reason, the hypothesis was put forward that genetic and epigenetic markers related to 5-HT metabolism predict individual differences in social cognitive functioning. Social cognitions are complex mental processes necessary for perceiving, interpreting and reacting to the behaviors of others. In order to test this hypothesis one of the most prominent theory of mind tasks, the reading the mind in the eye test (RMET), was administered to N = 435 participants and measures of performance were related to the functional MAO-A VNTR polymorphism (relevant for 5-HT catabolism) and to epigenetic markers in the promoter of the TPH-2 gene (relevant for 5-HT synthesis). It was postulated that genetic and epigenetic markers of high 5-HT activity are positively related to RMET performance. Results show that the MAO-A high activity allele, together with the degree of methylation at a promoter CpG site on the TPH-2 gene explain significant proportions of variance in the RMET performance even after controlling for age and sex effects.
Attention and capacity limits in perception: A cellular metabolism account
Merit Bruckmaier et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Limits on perceptual capacity result in various phenomena of inattentional blindness. Here we propose a neurophysiological account attributing these perceptual capacity limits directly to limits on cerebral cellular metabolism. We hypothesized that overall cerebral energy supply remains constant, irrespective of mental task demand, and therefore an attention mechanism is required to regulate cellular metabolism levels in line with task demands. Increased perceptual load in a task (imposing a greater demand on neural computations) should thus result in increased metabolism underlying attended processing, and reduced metabolism mediating unattended processing. We tested this prediction measuring oxidation states of cytochrome c oxidase (oxCCO), an intracellular marker of cellular metabolism. Broadband near-infrared spectroscopy was used to record oxCCO levels from human visual cortex while participants (both sexes) performed a rapid sequential visual search task under either high perceptual load (complex feature-conjunction search) or low load (feature pop-out search). A task-irrelevant, peripheral checkerboard was presented on a random half of trials. Our findings showed that oxCCO levels in visual cortex regions responsive to the attended-task stimuli were increased in high versus low perceptual load, while oxCCO levels related to unattended processing were significantly reduced. A negative temporal correlation of these load effects further supported our metabolism trade-off account. These results demonstrate an attentional compensation mechanism that regulates cellular metabolism levels according to processing demands. Moreover, they provide novel evidence for the widely-held stipulation that overall cerebral metabolism levels remain constant irrespective of mental task demand and establish a neurophysiological account for capacity limits in perception.
It goes with the territory: Ownership across spatial boundaries
James Strachan, Merryn Constable & Günther Knoblich
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, August 2020, Pages 789–797
Abstract:
Previous studies have shown that people are faster to process objects that they own as compared with objects that other people own. Yet object ownership is embedded within a social environment that has distinct and sometimes competing rules for interaction. Here we ask whether ownership of space can act as a filter through which we process what belongs to us. Can a sense of territory modulate the well-established benefits in information processing that owned objects enjoy? In 4 experiments participants categorized their own or another person’s objects that appeared in territories assigned either to themselves or to another. We consistently found that faster processing of self-owned than other-owned objects only emerged for objects appearing in the self-territory, with no such advantage in other territories. We propose that knowing whom spaces belong to may serve to define the space in which affordances resulting from ownership lead to facilitated processing.