Lecture 1: Introductions Flashcards
Example model of creativity
Divides by quadrants
Cognitive (problem solving) - most of this is deliberate but sometimes it may be insight
Emotional
Deliberate and spotanteous
Cognitive and deliberate
Cognitive but spontaneous
Emotional and spontaneous
Emotional and deliberate
Scientific experiments
Isaac Newton: apple and gravity
Falling in love
Expression of emotions through art
How can we measure creativity?
Alternate uses task (AUT)
The candle problem
Remote association task
How can we improve creativity?
Think about what gets in the way
Functional fixedness: a cognitive bias that limits a person to think they can only use the task for its original purpose
Restructuring
Incubation
What is Wallis’ model of creativity
Prep
Incubation
Illumination
Verification
How does curiosity relate to creativity?
It can modulate all these stages
It is like an internal process which turns on / off processing in the brain
Standard model of consolidation
Memories undergo a process of prolonged / system consolidation that could last months or even decades
Hippocampal contribution is diminished when consolidation is finished
Disruption of consolidation activities leads to poorly formed memories and thus forgetting
What happens in incubation?
Brain replays memories: which we think is linked to consolidation process
One we can measure is using place cells in rodents
place cells: cells in hippocampus which activate in certain locations
This means we can easily track when they are replaying these memories
Historical overview and definitions of curiosity
- Early philosophers:
○ Aristotle: “all men by nature desire to know”
○ Cicero: “passion for learning”
○ Historically, curiosity was viewed positively - to get a desire to know- Daniel Berlyne (1996):
○ “the condition of discomfort, due to inadequacy of information, that motivates specific exploration is what we call curiosity”
○ First research on curiosity - George Loewenstein (1994):
- “curiosity = a form of cognitively induced deprivation that arises from the perception of a gap in knowledge or understanding”
○ This is the concept which has the most studies
- Daniel Berlyne (1996):
What is the most common definition of curiosity? Does this help?
“the desire to acquire new information”
This definition is too broad: need to break it down into components to make it easily
What are tinbergens 4 questions?
They provide a vantage point to stimulate research
The function of curiosity: to learn/be more creative / can create experiments to learn if we need curiosity to be creative
The evolution: is there any advantage to being a curious person e.g in the stone age, being curious may be dangerous? Must be some advantage
The neural mechanisms: what is the mechanism of curiosity - what are the brain circuits to support it?
The development of curiosity - how does it develop during lifetime? Infants and children are naturally curious
What elicits curiosity?
Novelty
Knowledge Gap
Confidence
Complexity
Incongruence
Self relevance
What is the knowledge gap?
Logenstein: medium knowledge gap stimulates the most amount of curiosity
How can we measure / study curiosity?
Trait
- Sub-facets: diversive vs specific curiosity
State
- Trivia questions - epistemic curiosity
- Blurred / scrambled stimuli - perceptual curiosity
- Lottery task
- Emotionally negative stimuli - morbid curiosity
