Most jazz music contains some form of improvisation. Therefore, teaching improvisation, or spontaneous musical composition within a given context, remains an important task in music education. Discovering the neural processes involved in jazz improvisation might aid music educators who teach jazz improvisation and give researchers greater insight…

The "standard" definition of creativity as novel and useful describes creative products, but creativity is constituted by processes. This misalignment contributes to the oft-noted challenges of operationalizing creativity. Here, we distinguish creativity as a process from creativity as an attribute (i.e. "creative-ness").…

Drawing on the enactive account and the 4E's approach to cognition, we discuss here how both physical play and dance improvisational practice can be seen as (participatory) sense-making processes. In this article, we will specifically focus on children's physical play and dance improvisation since both activities are open-ended, creative and call…

Recent voices in creativity research emphasize the vital role that processes of active engagement and interaction play. These distributed, interactivity-based, and ecological accounts critique the reduction of creativity to mental mechanisms and eschew the methodological individualism that underlies this view. Instead, they elevate socio-material…

Cognitive reserve relies on the ability to effectively cope with aging and brain damage by using alternate processes to approach tasks when standard approaches are no longer available. In this study, the issue if creativity can predict cognitive reserve has been explored. Forty participants (mean age: 61 years) filled out: the Cognitive Reserve…

The present work proposes an integrative model of creativity that includes personality traits and cognitive processes. This model hypothesizes that three high-order personality factors predict two main process factors, which in turn predict intensity and achievement of creative activities. The personality factors are: "Plasticity" (high…

The author considers combinatory play as an intersection between creativity, play, and neuroaesthetics. She discusses combinatory play as vital to the creative process in art and science, particularly with regard to the incubation of new ideas. She reviews findings from current neurobiological research and outlines the way that the brain activates…

In this reflective essay, Eric Booth utilizes his Habits of Mind for Creative Engagement to offer two suggestions for intensifying the impact of arts learning in schools. Booth's first suggestion redefines what artistic engagement really means and where it can contribute to creative learning. His second suggestion advocates for the use of…

This article critically reviews the extant literature on scientific creativity and metaphorical thinking. Metaphorical thinking is based on a conceptual transfer of relationships or mapping, from a well-known source domain to a poorly known target domain, which could result in creative outcomes in sciences. Creativity leads to products that are…

This paper examines two improvisational processes, Authentic Movement (AM) and automatic drawing (AD), the possibility of their presentation to the viewer and the meanings such presentation may bring to the work presented. Improvisation has traditionally been used in the process of creating a finished work of art rather than in the finished art…

This study compared the creative self-direction, creative behavior, and creative activities of preschool children to determine if students and teachers trained in the creative process and in observation techniques can, with reliability, observe the creative potential of young children. Creative abilities of 155 children from four preschool centers…

Studies of creativity have generally dealt with the creative act, typically defined as the statistically infrequent approach to problem solving. A study was conducted to determine whether a relationship exists between problem discovery and originality of the written product, and whether problem-finding behavior may be observed in student writers.…

Eight sixth grade gifted students verbalized their thoughts as they worked on figural task drawings. Analysis of resulting data indicated that the process variables of Story Weaving, Association Shifting, and Vantage were more frequently evidenced by subjects producing more original products, whereas Content Bound Linking was associated with…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether creativity could be facilitated by a training method based on a salient characteristic of the creative individual, namely, his ability to synthesize elements from two disparate psychological entities: (1) visual experiences; and (2) emotional states. A four-session training program is described in…

In this outcomes study (N=40), changes in stress levels were compared across two participant conditions for a period of artistic activity with a cognitive focus on either a personally stressful or positive situation. Results indicated that participants in the positive-focus condition demonstrated a significant decrease in stress, whereas…