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Vol.34 No.3

초록보기
Abstract

Creative thinking is defined as a mental process that involves novel and useful idea generation. Executive functions (EF's), a set of goal-directed cognitive functions, can play an important role in creative thinking. However, previous findings reported conflicting results regarding the relation between creative thinking and EF's. In this meta-analysis study, we aimed to identify moderator effects of the EF types and/or congruency between stimulus modalities used in creative thinking and EF tasks, by analyzing 232 effects from 28 research papers. For this purpose, each EF task used in the previous studies was subdivided into ‘semantic’ and ‘domain-general’. Additionally, the stimulus modalities used in the creative thinking and EF tasks were divided into ‘verb’, ‘non-verb’, and ‘multi-modal’, and were classified as ‘same’ or ‘different’ according to the congruency between the tasks. The results showed that the effect sizes for creative thinking were greater in the semantic EF compared to domain-general EF, and those of the same modality were greater than different modality. In conclusion, it appears to be necessary to consider the type of EF and the stimulus modality of tasks for the relation between creative thinking and EF's.

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Abstract

Creativity is the ability to generate original and useful ideas. Although many studies have shown that cognitive flexibility is important for creative problem solving, empirical evidence supporting the relationship between flexibility, as a component of executive function (EF-flexibility), and creativity is largely lacking in the previous studies. In this review, we sought to provide a conceptual and methodological basis for examining the relationship between EF-flexibility and creativity. To this end, we classified various concepts for flexibility into three perspectives (i.e., creative thought, divergent thinking, and executive functions) and analyzed differences in regard of their conceptual and methodological characteristics. Each perspective provides distinct definition of cognitive flexibility such as a trait of cognition that leads to creative findings, an ability to generate ideas from diverse categories, and an ability to shift between mental sets. In particular, empirical studies of EF-flexibility showed that their results were inconsistent with each other due to adopting different operational definitions for EF-flexibility. Finally, we suggest some essential considerations for measuring EF-flexibility and highlight some topics for future research to concretely understand the relation between EF-flexibility and creativity.

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Abstract

The concealed information test (CIT) assesses the recognition of crime-relevant information, which is possible to conduct only when specific material evidence is seized. As an attempt to solve this problem, we examined whether the P300-based CIT using the suspect’s statement is a potentially valid method to classify an individual as guilty or innocent. Therefore, we compared the event-related potentials in four conditions to imitate various situations at the scene of crime investigation: false statement(n=16), confess(n=16), deny(n=16) and innocent(n=17). Results showed that the difference in P300 amplitude between probe and irrelevant was significant in the false statement, confess and deny conditions, but not in the innocent condition. Moreover, false statement in the false statement condition elicited larger P300 amplitude than irrelevant, but probe elicited larger P300 amplitude than false statement. These results suggest that the P300-based CIT is possible to detect the actual criminal behavior from false statements and assess the veracity of confessions.

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Abstract

It is generally believed that humans can detect errors in their estimates and maintain a sense of confidence that corresponds to objective performance. Meanwhile, human perceptual estimations tend to commit two types of errors: bias and variability. It remains unclear whether humans can monitor these two distinct kinds of error in their own estimates and adjust levels of confidence accordingly. Using a well-established empirical regularity called the central tendency effect, we examined how behavioral bias and variability are reflected in the self-evaluation of perceptual estimations. Subjects estimated the location of a hidden target from a briefly presented dot-cloud centered on the target location and reported levels of confidence in their estimations. As expected, subjects' perceptual reports were not only variable across trials but also biased toward the mean of the distribution of target locations. Crucially, subjects' confidence reports remained constant regardless of the target location, which is in stark contrast to the fact that the perceptual performance was worse when the target location was farther from the mean of the target location distribution. Our findings indicate that the metacognitive evaluations of perceptual estimations reflect the behavioral variability, but not biases.

초록보기
Abstract

The Multiple-object tracking task (MOT) is a task in which participants track the movement of some targets out of the randomly moving stimuli. In order to successfully perform MOT, attention should be assigned to the targets. There has been controversy over whether information of the distractors affects MOT performance. The current study focused on MOT performance when the perceptual organization between targets and distractors interferes with the attentional allocation on the targets. We manipulated the ratio of targets and distractors constituting a perceptually organized group by sharing the same movement according to the common fate law (target-distractor respectively 5-0, 4-1, 3-2, 2-3, 1-4, 0-5), and checked whether MOT performance was changed according to the manipulation. As a result, compared to when grouped by targets alone, the conditions in which targets and distractors were grouped together showed relatively lower tracking accuracy. However, when grouped by distractors alone, high accuracy was found. These results indicate that perceptional grouping affects MOT performance by capturing attention, and that even one of distractors negatively affects MOT performance if it is grouped perceptually by targets.

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology