Cultural influences on artistic creativity and its evaluation

Two studies were designed to compare (a) the rated creativity of artworks created by American and Chinese college students, and (b) the criteria used by American and Chinese judges to evaluate these artworks. The study demonstrated that the two groups of students differed in their artistic creativity. American participants produced more creative and aesthetically pleasing artworks than did their Chinese counterparts, and this difference in performance was recognized by both American and Chinese judges. The difference between the use of criteria by American and Chinese judges was small, and consisted mainly of the American judges' use of stricter standards in evaluating overall creativity. Moreover, in general, there was a greater consensus among Chinese judges regarding what constitutes creativity than among American judges. The study also revealed, but preliminarily, that the artistic creativity of Chinese students was more likely to be reduced as a function of restrictive task constraints or of the absence of explicit instructions to be creative. The results of this study seem to support the hypothesis that an independent self‐oriented culture is more encouraging of the development of artistic creativity than is an interdependent self‐oriented culture. Other possible explanations, such as differences in people's attitudes toward and motivation for engaging in art activities, or socioeconomic factors might also account for differences in people's artistic creativity.     

Levels of processing: A view from functional brain imaging

This paper briefly reviews two central assumptions of the levels-of-processing framework in the light of findings from recent PET and fMRI studies: First, to address the suggestion that memory traces can be seen as records of analyses carried out for the purposes of perception and comprehension, studies on encoding-retrieval overlap in brain activation patterns are considered. Second, to address the suggestion that deeper, more semantic, processing results in more durable traces, studies of how encoding activity relates to processing depth and subsequent memory performance are examined. The results show that some of the sensory regions that are activated during initial perception are subsequently reactivated during retrieval, and activity in frontal and medial-temporal brain regions is related to depth of processing and level of memory performance. Collectively, these results provide support for central components of the levels framework.     

Driving experience and the functional field of view

Research has suggested that novice drivers have different search strategies compared with their more experienced counterparts, and that this may contribute to their increased accident liability. One issue of concern is whether experienced drivers have a wider field of peripheral vision than less experienced drivers. This study attempted to distinguish between people of varying driving experience on the basis of their functional fields of view. Participants searched video clips taken from a moving driver's perspective for potential hazards while responding to peripheral target lights. Hit rates for peripheral targets decreased for all participant groups as processing demands increased (i.e. when hazards occurred) and as the eccentricity of the target increased, though there was no interaction. An effect of experience was also found which suggests that this paradigm measures a perceptual skill or strategy that develops with driving experience.     

Sex bias in the evaluation of performance in the scientific,artistic, and literary professions: A review

This article reviews published research on sex differential evaluation of art objects, articles, essays, and poetry that use the Goldberg paradigm in which the sex identification of the stimulus person is varied while the object to be evaluated is kept identical. Sex biases appear to be more limited in scope and more complex in nature than has at first been suspected. The occurrence of antifemale bias appears to depend upon characteristics of the stimulus object or person, characteristics of the judges and the judgment situation, and the way in which judgments are provided. However, none of the studies used professional judges, or provided realistic judgment procedures and contexts. Therefore the question of the external validity of the studies remains open.This study was performed as part of a doctoral dissertation concerning creative achievement of female and male visual artists. Portions of this paper were reported in a presentation at the First European Congress of Psychology, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, July 1989.I would like to express my appreciation to Lisette van Ardenne, Wim K. B. Hofstee, Wim B. G. Liebrand, Peter F. Lourens, Mariette Meester, and Iteke J. Weeda for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.     

Levels of processing: a view from functional brain imaging

This paper briefly reviews two central assumptions of the levels-of-processing framework in the light of findings from recent PET and fMRI studies: First, to address the suggestion that memory traces can be seen as records of analyses carried out for the purposes of perception and comprehension, studies on encoding-retrieval overlap in brain activation patterns are considered. Second, to address the suggestion that deeper, more semantic, processing results in more durable traces, studies of how encoding activity relates to processing depth and subsequent memory performance are examined. The results show that some of the sensory regions that are activated during initial perception are subsequently reactivated during retrieval, and activity in frontal and medial-temporal brain regions is related to depth of processing and level of memory performance. Collectively, these results provide support for central components of the levels framework.     

A European view

A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis by Lewis Aron (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1996)     

Neural dichotomy of word concreteness: a view from functional neuroimaging

Our perception about the representation and processing of concrete and abstract concepts is based on the fact that concrete words are highly imagined and remembered faster than abstract words. In order to explain the processing differences between abstract and concrete concepts, various theories have been proposed, yet there is no unanimous consensus about its neural implication. The present study investigated the processing of concrete and abstract words during an orthography judgment task (implicit semantic processing) using functional magnetic resonance imaging to validate the involvement of the neural regions. Relative to non-words, both abstract and concrete words show activation in the regions of bilateral hemisphere previously associated with semantic processing. The common areas (conjunction analyses) observed for abstract and concrete words are bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45), left superior parietal (BA 7), left fusiform gyrus and bilateral middle occipital. The additional areas for abstract words were noticed in bilateral superior temporal and bilateral middle temporal region, whereas no distinct region was noticed for concrete words. This suggests that words with abstract concepts recruit additional language regions in the brain.     

A Buddhist view of abortion

This paper examines the abortion issue from a Buddhist perspective. As the consciousness is held to enter the embryo at conception, it is felt to be fully human at that moment. Thus, Buddhism strongly discourages abortion except in the situation of an immediate threat to the mother's life. Though Buddhism has clearly a pro-life position on abortion, the final decision should be left to the pregnant woman.     

A model point of view

This paper reports a study of planning processes in the five-disc Tower of London (TOL) task in 20 younger and 20 older adult participants. A concurrent direct “think-aloud” method was used to obtain data on planning processes prior to moving discs in the TOL. A check was made of the effects of verbalising by comparing performance data from the experimental groups with data from control groups who did not verbalise during planning or moving. Verbalising slowed down planning and moving but did not appear to distort the participants' approaches to the task. Older and younger participants did not differ in average moves taken to solve the tasks. However, older participants' planning was less complete and more error-prone than that of younger participants. The planning processes were characterised as showing a means-ends “goal selection” strategy. In this strategy participants (1) identify a single active goal disc at the start, (2) select moves and move sequences to enable the placing of the current goal disc in its target position, and (3) continue in this way until all discs are in their target positions. Age differences were found in the planning stage, during which there was no stimulus support and hence a substantial working memory load. During the move phase there was stimulus support and hence little loading of working memory. Age differences in moves required were not found in the move phase. As older participants tend to have depleted working memory capacity the present results suggest that working memory is heavily loaded in TOL planning but less so in the move phase of TOL.