The Relationships Between Cognitive Reserve and Creativity. A Study on American Aging Population

Abstract

The Cognitive Reserve (CR) hypothesis suggests that the brain actively attempts to cope with neural damages by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or by enlisting compensatory approaches. This would allow an individual with high CR to better cope with aging than an individual with lower CR. Many of the proxies used to assess CR indirectly refer to the flexibility of thought. The present paper aims at directly exploring the relationships between CR and creativity, a skill that includes flexible thinking. We tested a sample of 72 adults (aged between 45 and 78) assessing both their level of CR and their creativity. To evaluate CR we used the proxies commonly used in literature, namely, three subtests from the WAIS (vocabulary, similarities, and digit span) and the years of education. We also used an ad-hoc test asking people to report how frequently they tend to perform activities that are believed to increase CR. We used verbal creativity tasks (alternative uses and generation of acronyms) to assess individual levels of creativity. We asked participants to describe their main occupation (present or past) and coded each occupation as creative or not creative. Results (controlling for age-related differences) showed that scores from the WAIS correlated positively with creativity performance, even though correlations varied across the subtests. Focusing on the frequency and type of activities that people perform, and comparing individuals who have or had a creative job to those with a routine job, a clear relationship between creativity and CR emerged. This effect was more relevant than the level of job complexity. Implications for the study of CR and aging are discussed.

A Comparison of Divergent Thinking Abilities Between Healthy Elderly Subjects and MCI Patients: Preliminary Findings and Implications

“…Moreover, elderly people seemed to perform significantly better than young people in verbal tasks, whereas they performed worse in visual tasks (Passafiume et al, 2010); as a result, it seems that figural DT is more affected even in MCI patients. Additionally, this result also seems to be in line with the existing literature about the relationship between DT and CR, which has evidenced that verbal (Palmiero et al, 2016;Colombo et al, 2018) but not visual (Palmiero et al, 2016) DT predicts CR. Thus, the idea that CR can be generally related to verbal ability (Palmiero et al, 2016), has already been advanced; it is consequently possible to hypothesize that CR might have a protective role on verbal (but not figural) DT abilities during early and prodromal stages of the disease, allowing patients to perform in a way comparable to control subjects.…”

“…Divergent thinking has also recently received renewed attention because of its potential for early diagnosis (Hart and Wade, 2006) and rehabilitation programs in patients affected by different neurological diseases, particularly by dementia (Palmiero et al, 2012). Moreover, recent evidence has highlighted a significant and positive correlation between DT abilities and the construct of Cognitive Reserve (CR; Meléndez et al, 2016;Palmiero et al, 2016;Colombo et al, 2018), which is a pivotal concept in the field of aging. CR is indeed considered a protective factor against cognitive decline and refers to a functional benefit (rather than structural, i.e., brain reserve) associated with different life experiences, such as educational level, occupation, and cognitively stimulating leisure activities, that seem to provide protection against the effects of brain damage or pathology; thus, people with higher CR are believed to cope better with potential brain damage by recruiting compensatory processes (Stern, 2002(Stern, , 2009(Stern, , 2014.…”

The Mediating Role of Cognitive Flexibility in the Influence of Counter-Stereotypes on Creativity

“…On the contrary, counter-stereotypes refer to an individual’s cognitive views of a social group—in terms of perceived behaviors or traits—which are inconsistent with or contrary to the mindset of the social group in question (Liu and Zuo, 2006; Leicht et al, 2017). Recently, many studies have focused on whether presentation of counter-stereotypic information would influence people’s cognitive abilities (Damer et al, 2017; Colombo et al, 2018). These studies have suggested that presentation of counter-stereotypic information not only reduces stereotypes and prejudice related to certain groups (Dasgupta and Greenwald, 2001; Columb and Plant, 2011; Lai et al, 2014; Finnegan et al, 2015), but also promotes an individual’s cognitive flexibilities and may concomitantly affect creativity (Asgari et al, 2010; Asgari et al, 2012).…”

Boosting Creativity, but Only for Low Creative Connectivity: The Moderating Effect of Priming Stereotypically Inconsistent Information on Creativity

“…Creativity plays a vital role in individual career success and represents an unconventional way of thinking that is critical to problem solving, individual progress, change, and innovation (Ward et al, 2008; Tyagi et al, 2017). To fully tap the creative potential of individuals, researchers have explored and validated various factors that may affect creativity, such as individual factors—including personality traits and intelligence (Nusbaum and Silvia, 2011; Simonton, 2014; Barbara et al, 2018; Kenett et al, 2018)—and environmental factors, including family environment and cultural background (Peijia et al, 2006; Lew and Cho, 2013). Thus, most previous studies on creativity have focused on the influence of relatively stable factors.…”