No abstract

Creative thinking drives progress not only in the arts but also, and perhaps especially, in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and it is expected to become even more valuable than technical skill as artificial intelligence outpaces human cognition. Fostering creative thinkers has become a primary focus of educators. Educationally relevant anxieties, like math anxiety, have been shown to substantially impact specific forms of achievement and engagement, both in school and in career pursuits. Identifying these anxieties has led to promising interventions to enable affected individuals to reach their potential. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the possibility of anxiety specific to creative thinking is, to our knowledge, unexplored. In this article, across multiple samples, we tested the viability of creativity anxiety as a construct. We first created a new measure, the Creativity Anxiety Scale (CAS), demonstrating validity, internal reliability, and specificity. Applying the CAS revealed that creativity-specific anxiety predicted individual differences in creative achievement and attitudes toward creativity over and above effects of general anxiety. Moreover, across diverse content domains, from science to arts, anxiety was greater for situations that required creativity than similar situations that did not. Notably, this effect was especially pronounced in women. These findings suggest that creativity anxiety may have widereaching impacts and distinguish creativity anxiety from anxiety about noncreative aspects of performance. Establishing creativity anxiety as a novel construct, and the CAS as a valid measurement instrument, opens a new avenue of research that promises to deepen basic understanding of creative cognition and inform development of interventions to enable greater achievement of creative potential.

Relational reasoning is a complex form of human cognition involving the evaluation of relations between mental representations of information. Prior studies have modified stimulus properties of relational reasoning problems and examined differences in difficulty between different problem types. While subsets of these stimulus properties have been addressed in separate studies, there has not been a comprehensive study, to our knowledge, which investigates all of these properties in the same set of stimuli. This investigative gap has resulted in different findings across studies which vary in task design, making it challenging to determine what stimulus properties make relational reasoning—and the putative formation of mental models underlying reasoning—difficult. In this article, we present the Multidimensional Relational Reasoning Task (MRRT), a task which systematically varied an array of stimulus properties within a single set of relational reasoning problems. Using a mixed-effects framework, we demonstrate that reasoning problems containing a greater number of the premises as well as multidimensional relations led to greater task difficulty. The MRRT has been made publicly available for use in future research, along with normative data regarding the relative difficulty of each problem.

Creative cognition has been consistently associated with functional connectivity between frontoparietal control and default networks. However, recent research identified distinct connectivity dynamics for subnetworks within the larger frontoparietal system—one subnetwork (FPCNa) shows positive coupling with the default network and another subnetwork (FPCNb) shows negative default coupling—raising questions about how these networks interact during creative cognition. Here we examine frontoparietal subnetwork functional connectivity in a large sample of participants (n = 171) who completed a divergent creative thinking task and a resting-state scan during fMRI. We replicated recent findings on functional connectivity of frontoparietal subnetworks at rest: FPCNa positively correlated with the default network and FPCNb negatively correlated with the default network. Critically, we found that divergent thinking evoked functional connectivity between both frontoparietal subnetworks and the default network, but in different ways. Using community detection, we found that FPCNa regions showed greater coassignment to a default network community. However, FPCNb showed overall stronger functional connectivity with the default network—reflecting a reversal of negative connectivity at rest—and the strength of FPCNb-default network connectivity correlated with individual creative ability. These findings provide novel evidence of a behavioral benefit to the cooperation of typically anticorrelated brain networks.

No abstract

Current debate surrounds the promise of neuroscience for education, including whether learning-related neural changes can predict learning transfer better than traditional performance-based learning assessments. Longstanding debate in philosophy and psychology concerns the proposition that spatial processes underlie seemingly nonspatial/verbal reasoning (mental model theory). If so, education that fosters spatial cognition might improve verbal reasoning. Here, in a quasi-experimental design in real-world STEM classrooms, a curriculum devised to foster spatial cognition yielded transfer to improved verbal reasoning. Further indicating a spatial basis for verbal transfer, students’ spatial cognition gains predicted and mediated their reasoning improvement. Longitudinal fMRI detected learning-related changes in neural activity, connectivity, and representational similarity in spatial cognition–implicated regions. Neural changes predicted and mediated learning transfer. Ensemble modeling demonstrated better prediction of transfer from neural change than from traditional measures (tests and grades). Results support in-school “spatial education” and suggest that neural change can inform future development of transferable curricula.

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a “developmental cascade” for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the linkage between motor skills and spatial cognition, and spatial cognition with deductive reasoning, no research has explored the developmental connection between early motor skills and reasoning ability, a plausible pathway through which the developmental cascade operates. Drawing data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (N = 1,233; 95% British, 5% other race/ethnicity; 54% male, 46% female; 7% low income, 80% middle income, 12% high income), this study investigated whether there was a relationship between gross and fine motor skills in infancy (22 months of age) and early childhood (42 months of age) and visuospatial deductive reasoning in adolescence (at 10 and 16 years of age). Results indicated that fine but not gross motor skills during early childhood positively predicted reasoning in adolescence. Critically, the fine motor-reasoning association mediated the previously observed link between early fine motor skills and adolescent reading and math ability. These results deepen our understanding of developmental cascade theory and mental model theory by identifying visuospatial reasoning (i.e., mental modeling) as a potential mechanism through which motor skills initiate cognitive development and academic success in reading and math. These findings also highlight the importance of early intervention programs targeting motor skills and illuminate the impact of those interventions on later cognitive and academic skills.

No abstract