There are obstacles to creativity: one of them is called fixation effect, the fact that some knowledge about existing or obvious solutions is spontaneously activated and constrains the generation of new solutions. Converging evidence in cognitive psychology has indicated that the ability to generate original ideas can be limited by recently activated knowledge, such as examples of solutions. On the other hand, neuroimaging studies have recently demonstrated that exposure to examples could, on the contrary, have a stimulating effect on originality. To make sense of what seems to be contradictory studies, we hypothesized that two types of examples could have opposite effects on originality: (1) restrictive examples-within the fixation effect-could lead to a reduction in the originality of the solutions, whereas (2) expansive examples-outside the fixation effect-could provoke solutions of higher originality. Results from a total of 160 participants confirmed that the solutions proposed by the group exposed to restrictive examples were less original than those given by the group exposed to expansive examples.

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Dual-process theories have suggested that emotion plays a key role in the framing effect in decision-making. However, little is known about the potential impact of a specific positive or negative emotional context on this bias. We investigated this question with adult participants using an emotional priming paradigm. First, participants were presented with positive or negative affective pictures (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant photographs). Afterward, participants had to perform a financial decision-making task that was unrelated to the pictures previously presented. The results revealed that the presentation framed in terms of gain or loss no longer affected subjects' decision-making following specific exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, a positive emotional context did not globally influence risk-taking behavior but specifically decreased the risk propensity in the loss frame. This finding confirmed that a positive emotional context can reduce loss aversion, and it strongly reinforced the dual-process view that the framing effect stems from an affective heuristic belonging to intuitive System 1.

This study investigated how global and local perceptual processes evolve during childhood according to the meaningfulness of the stimuli. Children had to decide whether visually presented pairs of items were identical or not. Items consisted of global forms made up of local forms. Both global and local forms could represent either objects or nonobjects. In dissimilar pairs, items differed at one level (target level), while the other level included similar forms on both sides (irrelevant level). The results indicate an evolution from local preference at 4 years of age to adult-like global preference at 9 years of age. Moreover, as previously reported in adults, regardless of age, identification impaired performance when the irrelevant level was made of objects and the target level was made of nonobjects (interference). However, in younger children, this interference existed even when objects were present at all levels, suggesting that the strategy used to perform the comparison task also varied according to age.

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Difficulties in cognitive control including inhibitory control (IC) are related to the pathophysiology of several psychiatric conditions. In healthy subjects, IC efficiency in childhood is a strong predictor of academic and professional successes later in life. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is one of the core structures responsible for IC. Although quantitative structural characteristics of the ACC contribute to IC efficiency, the qualitative structural brain characteristics contributing to IC development are less-understood. Using anatomical magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated whether the ACC sulcal pattern at age 5, a stable qualitative characteristic of the brain determined in utero, explains IC at age 9. 18 children performed Stroop tasks at age 5 and age 9. Children with asymmetrical ACC sulcal patterns (n=7) had better IC efficiency at age 5 and age 9 than children with symmetrical ACC sulcal patterns (n=11). The ACC sulcal patterns appear to affect specifically IC efficiency given that the ACC sulcal patterns had no effect on verbal working memory. Our study provides the first evidence that the ACC sulcal pattern - a qualitative structural characteristic of the brain not affected by maturation and learning after birth - partially explains IC efficiency during childhood.

BackgroundA real-world visual scene consists of local elements (e.g. trees) that are arranged coherently into a global configuration (e.g. a forest). Children show psychological evolution from a preference for local visual information to an adult-like preference for global visual information, with the transition in visual preference occurring around 6 years of age. The brain regions involved in this shift in visual preference have not been described.Methods and ResultsWe used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to study children during this developmental window to investigate changes in gray matter that underlie the shift from a bias for local to global visual information. Six-year-old children were assigned to groups according to their judgment on a global/local task. The first group included children who still presented with local visual processing biases, and the second group included children who showed global visual processing biases. VBM results indicated that compared to children with local visual processing biases, children with global visual processing biases had a loss of gray matter in the right occipital and parietal visuospatial areas.ConclusionsThese anatomical findings are in agreement with previous findings in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and represent the first structural identification of brain regions that allow healthy children to develop a global perception of the visual world.