Cognitive Investments in Academic Success: The Role of Need for Cognition at University

Grass, Julia; Strobel, Alexander; Strobel, Anja

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00790

Cited by 49 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(86 reference statements)

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“…Previous studies have shown that NFC acts as a positive predictor of individual academic achievement and work performance by promoting intrinsic motivation for the pursuit of knowledge and extensive cognitive processing (Grass et al, ; Luong et al, ; Neigel et al, ; Weissgerber et al, ; Wu et al, ). We extended existing research and found that NFC showed a positive correlation with creative achievement, which further confirmed the close relationship between NFC and creativity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A wide variety of behavioral studies have suggested that NFC not only contributes to better task performance or problem solving but also shows a close correlation with creativity, such as divergent thinking, creative problem solving, and innovative behaviors in various creative tasks (Dollinger, 2003;Hahn & Lee, 2017;Hardy, Ness, & Mecca, 2017;Madrid & Patterson, 2016;Rostan, 2010;Watts et al, 2017;Wu, Parker, & de Jong, 2014). Higher NFC individuals are more likely to generate creative ideas in response to ambiguous or ill-defined problems, possibly because they are willing to devote more cognitive resources in the face of complexity and enjoy the process of thinking (Dollinger, 2003;Grass, Strobel, & Strobel, 2017;Watts et al, 2017). Creative achievement, a more ecologically valid measure of creativity, has been regarded as the sum of creative accomplishments achieved by an individual during his or her lifetime, which reflects longterm creative behaviors and may be used as a comprehensive indicator to assess individual differences in creative performance in daily life (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005;Chen et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Creative achievement, a more ecologically valid measure of creativity, has been regarded as the sum of creative accomplishments achieved by an individual during his or her lifetime, which reflects longterm creative behaviors and may be used as a comprehensive indicator to assess individual differences in creative performance in daily life (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005;Chen et al, 2014). To our knowledge, although there is considerable empirical evidence that supports NFC as a powerful predictor of academic achievement (Bertrams & Dickhaeuser, 2009;Grass et al, 2017;Luong et al, 2017;Neigel, Behairy, & Szalma, 2017;Weissgerber, Reinhard, & Schindler, 2018) and one study showed that NFC is correlated with everyday creative behavior (Dollinger, 2003), no research has directly examined the relationship between NFC and creative achievement. Here, we tested the relationship between NFC and creative achievement in the sciences and arts and further explored whether brain flexibility associated with NFC facilitated creative achievement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Zhuang

Liu

et al. 2019

Psychophysiology

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Advances in graph‐theoretic models of networks have made it possible to investigate the topological properties of the human brain across time and space. Brain flexibility is defined as the frequency with which brain regions switch between different functional modules over time and has been shown to correlate with higher‐order cognitive functions. Need for cognition (NFC) refers to a personality trait to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors and usually has a positive effect on diverse cognitive activities (e.g., creativity), which may also be closely related to brain flexibility. Here, we tested whether the flexibility of a large‐scale brain network associated with NFC facilitated creative achievement. Robust correlation analyses showed that NFC correlates with the flexibility of the insula, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the putamen at the node level. Several large‐scale brain networks whose flexibility also correlated with NFC, including the default mode network, salience network, subcortical network, ventral attention network, and control network, imply that higher NFC individuals may exhibit better cognitive abilities, such as executive control, salient detection, spontaneous thought, and motivation function. Interestingly, only global flexibility acted as a mediator in the relationship between NFC and creative achievement, suggesting that the mediating mechanism may involve an interaction between distinct regions or large‐scale networks across the entire brain instead of the functional characteristic of local regions. Together, we demonstrate that the higher NFC is, the more flexible the brain, which may provide a potential insight into the acquisition of creative achievement.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Zhuang

Liu

et al. 2019

Psychophysiology

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“…The mentioned association of NFC with positive affect together with reportedly lower scores in negative affect ( Fleischhauer et al, 2010 ) as well as in anxiety and depression ( Reeves et al, 1995 ; Epstein et al, 1996 ; Bertrams and Dickhäuser, 2012 ) may suggest that, beyond showing better performance in academic settings and cognitively demanding tasks, individuals high in NFC may also feel better while doing so. Indeed, this notion is supported by studies showing that among college students, NFC has beneficial effects on study satisfaction ( Grass et al, 2017 ) and life satisfaction ( Coutinho and Woolery, 2004 ; Gauthier et al, 2006 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Cognitive Engagement Mediates the Relationship between Positive Life Events and Positive Emotionality

2017

Self Cite

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Need for Cognition (NFC) is conceptualized as an individuals’ tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activity and, thus, captures one’s cognitive engagement. It plays a well-established role in information processing in experimental or academic contexts. However, so far comparably little is known about its consequences for other than purely cognitive or academic outcomes. Indeed, NFC is positively associated with personality traits pertaining to Positive Emotionality (PE) and negatively to traits related to Negative Emotionality (NE). Moreover, evidence suggests NFC to be related to an active, problem-focused coping style. We therefore hypothesized NFC to mediate between life events and individual differences in PE and NE. In a sample of N = 202 volunteers from the general population, we observed that the number of past positive and negative life events had direct effects on PE, and NE, respectively, and that for positive life events, a mediating effect on PE via NFC was observed, with a higher number of past positive life events being related to higher NFC that in turn was related to increased PE. Thus, the present results lend support to the notion of NFC as an important factor supporting personal well-being by way of its mediating role between the number of past positive life events and positive affect.

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“…Consequently, individual differences in NFC are associated with academic achievement (Luong et al 2017). High NFC was found to be associated with course achievements (Bertrams and Dickhäuser 2009;Sadowski and Gülgöz 1996), university GPA (grade point average) (Grass et al 2017), course grades mediated by difficulty of learning material (Leone and Dalton 1988), and performance in exams mediated by self-regulated learning and deep information processing (Cazan and Indreica 2004). In sum, NFC seems to be directly or indirectly related to learner characteristics relevant for academic success and to different forms of academic performance and achievement measures (for a review see Jebb et al 2016; see also the meta-analyses by Richardson et al 2012 andvon Stumm andAckermann 2013).…”

Section: Need For Cognition and The Generation Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effectiveness of Self-Generation During Learning is Dependent on Individual Differences in Need for Cognition.

Schindler

Reinhard

2019

FLR

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Self-generated information is better recognized and recalled than read information. This so-called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of stimulus material, different generation tasks, and retention intervals. The present study investigated the impact of individual differences in learners' disposition to engage in effortful cognitive activities (need for cognition, NFC) on the effectiveness of selfgeneration during learning. Learners low in NFC usually avoid getting engaged in cognitively demanding activities. However, if these learners are explicitly instructed to use elaborate learning strategies such as self-generation, they should benefit more from such strategies than learners high in NFC, because self-generation stimulates cognitive processes that learners low in NFC usually tend not to engage in spontaneously. Using a classical word-generation paradigm, we not only replicated the generation effect in free and cued recall but showed that the magnitude of the generation effect increased with decreasing NFC in cued recall. Results are consistent with our assumption that learners higher in NFC engage in elaborate processing even without explicit instruction, whereas learners lower in NFC usually avoid cognitively demanding activities. These learners need cognitively demanding tasks that require them to switch from shallow to elaborate processing to improve learning. We conclude that selfgeneration is beneficial regardless of the NFC level, but our study extends the existing literature on the generation effect and on NFC by showing that self-generation can be particularly useful for balancing the learning disadvantage of students lower in NFC.

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Cognitive Investments in Academic Success: The Role of Need for Cognition at University

Cited by 49 publications

References 40 publications

Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Brain flexibility associated with need for cognition contributes to creative achievement

Cognitive Engagement Mediates the Relationship between Positive Life Events and Positive Emotionality

Effectiveness of Self-Generation During Learning is Dependent on Individual Differences in Need for Cognition.

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