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Trends in Cognitive Sciences Feb 2016Creative thinking is central to the arts, sciences, and everyday life. How does the brain produce creative thought? A series of recently published papers has begun to... (Review)
Review
Creative thinking is central to the arts, sciences, and everyday life. How does the brain produce creative thought? A series of recently published papers has begun to provide insight into this question, reporting a strikingly similar pattern of brain activity and connectivity across a range of creative tasks and domains, from divergent thinking to poetry composition to musical improvisation. This research suggests that creative thought involves dynamic interactions of large-scale brain systems, with the most compelling finding being that the default and executive control networks, which can show an antagonistic relation, tend to cooperate during creative cognition and artistic performance. These findings have implications for understanding how brain networks interact to support complex cognitive processes, particularly those involving goal-directed, self-generated thought.
Topics: Brain; Cognition; Creativity; Humans; Neural Pathways; Thinking
PubMed: 26553223
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2015.10.004 -
Personality and Social Psychology... 2004This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed that...
This article describes a 2-systems model that explains social behavior as a joint function of reflective and impulsive processes. In particular, it is assumed that social behavior is controlled by 2 interacting systems that follow different operating principles. The reflective system generates behavioral decisions that are based on knowledge about facts and values, whereas the impulsive system elicits behavior through associative links and motivational orientations. The proposed model describes how the 2 systems interact at various stages of processing, and how their outputs may determine behavior in a synergistic or antagonistic fashion. It extends previous models by integrating motivational components that allow more precise predictions of behavior. The implications of this reflective-impulsive model are applied to various phenomena from social psychology and beyond. Extending previous dual-process accounts, this model is not limited to specific domains of mental functioning and attempts to integrate cognitive, motivational, and behavioral mechanisms.
Topics: Affect; Automatism; Decision Making; Humans; Impulsive Behavior; Judgment; Motivation; Social Behavior; Thinking
PubMed: 15454347
DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0803_1 -
Nature Human Behaviour Mar 2020Many fundamental choices in life are intertemporal: they involve trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. In recent years there has been a surge of interest into... (Review)
Review
Many fundamental choices in life are intertemporal: they involve trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. In recent years there has been a surge of interest into how people make intertemporal decisions, given that such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life and central in domains from substance use to climate change action. While it is clear that people make decisions according to rules, intuitions and habits, they also commonly deliberate over their options, thinking through potential outcomes and reflecting on their own preferences. In this Perspective, we bring to bear recent research into the higher-order capacities that underpin deliberation-particularly those that enable people to think about the future (prospection) and their own thinking (metacognition)-to shed light on intertemporal decision-making. We show how a greater appreciation for these mechanisms of deliberation promises to advance our understanding of intertemporal decision-making and unify a wide range of otherwise disparate choice phenomena.
Topics: Delay Discounting; Humans; Metacognition; Thinking
PubMed: 32184495
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-0834-9 -
Science and Engineering Ethics Apr 2015This paper argues that those who emphasise that designers and engineers need to plan for obsolescence are too conservative. Rather, in addition to planning for...
This paper argues that those who emphasise that designers and engineers need to plan for obsolescence are too conservative. Rather, in addition to planning for obsolescence, designers and engineers should also think carefully about what they could do in order delay obsolescence. They should so this by thinking about the design itself, thinking of ways in which products could be useful and appealing for longer before becoming obsolete, as well thinking about the wider context in terms of the marketing of products, and also the social and legal. The paper also considers objections that these suggestions are unrealistically idealistic, failing to recognise the economic realities. I respond to these objections appealing to research in advertising, psychology, cognitive linguistics, philosophy, history, and economics, as well as drawing on the Statement of Ethical Principles developed by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Engineering Council.
Topics: Engineering; Equipment Reuse; Ethics, Research; Humans; Moral Obligations; Philosophy; Technology; Thinking
PubMed: 24792878
DOI: 10.1007/s11948-014-9548-6 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Jun 2022Creativity is associated with finding novel, surprising, and useful solutions. We argue that creative cognitive processes, divergent thinking, abstraction, and... (Review)
Review
Creativity is associated with finding novel, surprising, and useful solutions. We argue that creative cognitive processes, divergent thinking, abstraction, and improvisation are constructed on different novelty-based processes. The prefrontal cortex plays a role in creative ideation by providing a control mechanism. Moreover, thinking about novel solutions activates the distant or loosely connected neurons of a semantic network that involves the hippocampus. Novelty can also be interpreted as different combinations of earlier learned processes, such as the motor sequencing mechanism of the basal ganglia. In addition, the cerebellum is responsible for the precise control of movements, which is particularly important in improvisation. Our neurocomputational perspective is based on three creative processes centered on novelty seeking, subserved by the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, basal ganglia, and dopamine. The algorithmic implementation of our model would enable us to describe commonalities and differences between these creative processes based on the proposed neural circuitry. Given that most previous studies have mainly provided theoretical and conceptual models of creativity, this article presents the first brain-inspired neural network model of creative cognition.
Topics: Brain; Brain Mapping; Cognition; Creativity; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Thinking
PubMed: 35430189
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104656 -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... May 2009Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence...
Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence helping to forge the concepts in which to think autism. This paper focuses on a series of autobiographies that began with Grandin's Emergence. These are often said to show us autism from the 'inside'. The paper proposes that instead they are developing ways to describe experience for which there is little pre-existing language. Wittgenstein has many well-known aphorisms about how we understand other people directly, without inference. They condense what he had found in Wolfgang Köhler's Gestalt Psychology. These phenomena of direct understanding what other people are doing are, Köhler wrote, 'the common property and practice of mankind'. They are not the common property and practice of people with autism. Ordinary language is rich in age-old ways to describe what others are thinking, feeling and so forth. Köhler's phenomena are the bedrock on which such language rests. There is no such discourse for autism, because Köhler's phenomena are absent. But a new discourse is being made up right now, i.e. ways of talking for which the autobiographies serve as working prototypes.
Topics: Autistic Disorder; Autobiographies as Topic; Concept Formation; Creativity; Humans; Language; Psychology
PubMed: 19528032
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0329 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jul 2011Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has...
Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal/up-down, vertical/left-right) and the marks on it (e.g., dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram.
Topics: Cognition; Communication; Humans; Thinking; Visual Perception
PubMed: 25164401
DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01113.x -
Ugeskrift For Laeger Apr 2023Sound diagnostic reasoning is a defining characteristic of the expert clinician. The prevailing psychological model of reasoning describes two systems of thought: a... (Review)
Review
Sound diagnostic reasoning is a defining characteristic of the expert clinician. The prevailing psychological model of reasoning describes two systems of thought: a fast, intuitive, but biased (System 1) and a rigorous, analytic, but slow (System 2). Clinicians use both systems during diagnostic reasoning but tend to lean toward a System 1-dominant approach as they get more experienced. This represents a potential source of diagnostic error, perhaps amenable to deliberate System 2 thinking. In this review, first principles reasoning is suggested as a method of System 2 thinking in a diagnostic context. .
Topics: Humans; Thinking; Problem Solving; Diagnostic Errors; Models, Psychological
PubMed: 37114578
DOI: No ID Found -
Journal of Graduate Medical Education Dec 2018
Topics: Decision Making; Diagnosis, Differential; Education, Medical, Graduate; Humans; Internship and Residency; Terminology as Topic; Thinking
PubMed: 30619535
DOI: 10.4300/JGME-D-00091.1 -
CBE Life Sciences Education Jun 2022As biological science rapidly generates new knowledge and novel approaches to address increasingly complex and integrative questions, biology educators face the...
As biological science rapidly generates new knowledge and novel approaches to address increasingly complex and integrative questions, biology educators face the challenge of teaching the next generation of biologists and citizens the skills and knowledge to enable them to keep pace with a dynamic field. Fundamentally, biology is the science of living systems. Not surprisingly, systems is a theme that pervades national reports on biology education reform. In this essay, we present systems as a unifying paradigm that provides a conceptual framework for all of biology and a way of thinking that connects and integrates concepts with practices. To translate the systems paradigm into concrete outcomes to support instruction and assessment in the classroom, we introduce the biology systems-thinking (BST) framework, which describes four levels of systems-thinking skills: 1) describing a system's structure and organization, 2) reasoning about relationships within the system, 3) reasoning about the system as a whole, and 4) analyzing how a system interacts with other systems. We conclude with a series of questions aimed at furthering conversations among biologists, biology education researchers, and biology instructors in the hopes of building support for the systems paradigm.
Topics: Biology; Humans; Problem Solving; Students; Systems Analysis; Thinking
PubMed: 35499820
DOI: 10.1187/cbe.21-05-0118