The Dancers’ Visuospatial Body Map Explains Their Enhanced Divergence in the Production of Motor Forms: Evidence in the Early Development

Abstract

Dance represents an opportunity to promote not only motor skills but also other cognitive functions and general well-being. In this study, 58 children aged 6–10 years were enrolled in order to test the issue if dance improves divergent thinking in motor and visual domains (domain-general and domain-specificity hypotheses), and whether the topological map of the body mediates their performance at the motor task (mediation hypothesis). Therefore, 33 children practicing dance were compared with a control group (25 children). Children were administered the visual divergent thinking task of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, consisting in making drawings starting from given shapes, and the motor-form divergent thinking task, opportunely developed consisting in producing acted motor forms in the extrapersonal space. Both tasks were presented for 10 min and were scored in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality. The ability to form the topological map of the body was measured by the frontal body-evocation test. Results revealed that children practicing dance outperformed the control group only in terms of the ability to perform motor forms. In addition, dancers showed a better topological map of the body, and, most importantly, besides the direct effect of group on the ability to produce acted motor forms, a significant indirect effect of the group, mediated by performances on frontal body-evocation task, was found. These results have important implications for cognition, showing that dance can improve the topological map of the body that in turn enhances creativity in motor domain since the early developmental age.

Field Dependent–independent Cognitive Style and Creativity From the Process and Product-Oriented Approaches: A Systematic Review

“…Across years, taking into consideration both process and product perspectives, creativity has been analyzed by exploring cognitive and extra-cognitive determinants (e.g., Benedek et al, 2014;Frith et al, 2021;Palmiero et al, 2019;Chávez-Eakle et al, 2012;Fink & Woschnjak, 2011;Giancola et al, 2021;Palmiero et al, 2020), including the impact of cognitive styles (e.g., Martinsen, 1997;Palmiero et al, 2016). They refer to the individual predisposition to acquire, organize, and use information across situations (Kozhevnikov et al, 2005), depicting one of the main individual resources involved in creativity, along with intelligence, personality, motivation, knowledge and so forth (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991).…”

Developing a Graphic Design Thinking Model to Enhance the Creative Thinking

“…Divergent thinking implies as many creative ideas or solutions as possible and involves fluency in the operation of creative thinking; originality allows for the generation of unique and novel ideas; flexibility refers to the exploration of different concepts and multiple categories of generating ideas; and elaboration emphasizes the ability to be more detailed and responsive (Guilford, 1967;Palmiero et al, 2019Palmiero et al, , 2020Torrance, 1987). Accordingly, this study shows the effectiveness of creative thinking using the GDT Model and verifies the improvement of Fluency, Originality, Elaboration, Flexibility and Metaphorical thinking in the implementation of Graphic Design Projects, thus showing the GDT model can enhance creative thinking greatly.…”

Is Visual Creativity Embodied? Thinking Aloud While Performing the Creative Mental Synthesis Task

“…Different studies provided evidence that the motor system or body information is recruited while generating creative ideas not only in motor domain [ 30 ], but also in other domains, especially using the approach based on divergent thinking, which consists of thinking of already existing objects or ideas in many novel ways (e.g., alternative uses of common objects). At a behavioral level, walking was found to enhance verbal divergent thinking [ 31 , 32 ], probably activating metaphorical abstract concepts [ 31 , 33 ], stimulating executive functions, as well as the development of the reconfiguration of challenging problem spaces, and the formation of novel associations [ 34 ].…”