Empathy emerges as a pivotal skill in creative writing, yet previous studies lack an understanding of empathy's multidimensionality and specific impact of its facets on the capacity to generate narrative stories. This cross-sectional study delved into the various cognitive and affective empathy facets --that is, perspective-taking, online…

The process of creative problem-solving (CPS) commonly demands that individuals consciously or unconsciously integrate creative ideas from a vast array of diverse information. Using a masked priming paradigm and the Chinese remote associates test (RAT), this study provides innovative behavioral evidence for the integration of multiple unconscious…

Creativity involves generating novel and valuable ideas. While the importance of creative thinking is widely acknowledged, its cognitive basis is poorly understood, particularly in older adults. This study aimed to develop and test an explanatory model of creative thinking to elucidate its underlying cognitive functions in an elderly sample. The…

Creativity is a key 21st-century skill and a consistent predictor of academic learning outcomes. Despite decades of research on creativity and learning, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying their relationship. In two studies, we examined whether creativity supports associative learning through associative thinking--the ability…

Creativity is a fundamental human accomplishment from scientific advances to composing music. The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) are important metacontrol hubs in flexibility and persistence brain states, respectively. Those hubs are related to divergent thinking, insight problem-solving, and…

S.A. Mednick (1962) proposed a theory of creativity suggesting that highly creative individuals can produce more word associations to a stimulus than less creative individuals. Numerous studies have supported this theory using the Remote Associates Test (RAT) as the measure of creativity. Additionally, some studies have suggested that…

Despite decades of research, the creative process remains to be fully understood, and most theories and empirical evidence focus on adults' creativity. Without understanding children's creative processes, the generalizability of these theories is questionable, which is crucial for teaching, learning, and parenting. However, studying children's…

Students often fail to write effective synthesis essays that compare multiple sources across common intersecting categories. Instead, they compose flawed essays that focus primarily on one source and then add a few ideas from other sources (patchwriting); report ideas from all sources in a disjointed fashion (tag-all writing); or draw from one…

Creativity is a relevant skill for human beings in order to overcome complex problems and reach novel solutions based on unexpected associations of concepts. Thus, the education of creativity becomes relevant, but there are not tools to automatically track the creative potential of learners over time. This work provides a novel set of behavioural…

Fifty years ago, Mednick ["Psychological Review", 69 (1962) 220] proposed an elaborate model that aimed to explain how creative ideas are generated and why creative people are more likely to have creative ideas. The model assumes that creative people have flatter associative hierarchies and as a consequence can more fluently retrieve…

An incubation effect occurs when taking a break from a problem helps solvers arrive at the correct solution more often than working on it continuously. The forgetting-fixation account, a popular explanation of how incubation works, posits that a break from a problem allows the solver to forget the incorrect path to the solution and finally access…

The present experiment examined whether or not the type of associations (close (e.g. apple-pear) and distant (e.g. apple-fish) word associations) and memory instruction (paying attention to the ideas of others) had effects on the idea generation performances in the brainwriting paradigm in which all participants shared their ideas by using paper…

The humor element as a reinforcing tool was examined. Experimental group subjects selecting nouns were shown humorous cartoons. Non-noun selection was followed by a humorless cartoon. Results indicated that humor significantly facilitated intentional learning for the low-creative experimental group. (Author/BEF)

To evaluate Mednick's theory of the creative thinking process, an associative priming paradigm was used to measure latencies to lexical decisions primed by associations of low, medium, or high strength with 20 high-creative and 20 low-creative high school students. Mednick's theory that creative individuals show a flatter associative hierarchy…

Educable mentally retarded (EMR) 13- to 15-year-olds (N=19) and matched mental-age comparison subjects (N=22) participated in an imagery-based, associative learning pictorial elaboration task, followed by a delayed test of incidental learning. Both groups were able to generate original elaborations, although fluency and incidental learning scores…