Creative Imagination is Stable Across Technological Media: The Spore Creature Creator Versus Pencil and Paper

T. B. Ward (1994) investigated creativity by asking participants to draw alien creatures that they imagined to be from a planet very different from Earth. He found that participant drawings reliably contained features typical of common Earth animals. As a consequence, Ward concluded that creativity is structured. The present investigation predicts that this limitation on creativity is not restricted to drawings: the use of different technology will not change creative output. To investigate this question, participants performed Ward's task twice: once using pencil and paper and once using software made to design creatures (the Spore Creature Creator). Only minor significant differences were found. This preliminarily suggests that changing tools does not affect the overall rigidity of the creative process. This lends further support to Ward's thesis on the structural rigidity of creativity. We conclude by suggesting an elaboration to Ward's thesis that will be explored in future work. We suggest that aesthetics might be one of the factors that contribute to creative constraint, in that creatures that are too unusual would be less interesting.     

Shifty talk: knowledge and causation

In this paper, I criticise one main strategy for supporting anti-intellectualism, the view that whether a subject knows may depend on the stakes. This strategy appeals to difficulties with developing contextualist and pragmatic treatments of the shiftiness of our talk about knowledge to motivate anti-intellectualism. I criticise this strategy by drawing an analogy between debates about causation and knowledge. In each case, talk about a phenomenon is shifty and contextualist and pragmatic explanations of the shifty talk face the same objections. However, in the case of causation it would be implausible to argue that difficulties with the relevant contextualist and pragmatic accounts motivate a revisionary metaphysics of causation. I conclude that the defender of anti-intellectualism needs to employ a different strategy to defend her view.     

Participatory Cues and Program Familiarity Predict Young Children's Learning From Educational Television

The capacity model is designed to predict young children's learning from educational television. It posits that select program features and individual child characteristics can support this learning either by increasing total working memory allocated to the program or altering the allocation of working memory. In this study, the influence of one such program feature (participatory cues) and one such child characteristic (program familiarity) on educational content comprehension was investigated. A total of 187 American preschool-aged children (M = 4.35 years) were randomly assigned to view one of two versions of Dora the Explorer—one version contained participatory cues (i.e., cues that encourage children to respond to queries during the program) while in the other these cues were omitted. All children completed a program familiarity assessment prior to viewing and completed an educational content assessment post-viewing. There was no significant main effect for participatory cues, although, as expected, program familiarity was positively associated with educational content comprehension. In line with expectations, program familiarity was found to moderate the relationship between participatory cues and educational comprehension—the combination of high program familiarity and the presence of participatory cues led to the greatest educational content comprehension. Implications are discussed.     

State-based versus reward-based motivation in younger and older adults

Recent decision-making work has focused on a distinction between a habitual, model-free neural system that is motivated toward actions that lead directly to reward and a more computationally demanding goal-directed, model-based system that is motivated toward actions that improve one’s future state. In this article, we examine how aging affects motivation toward reward-based versus state-based decision making. Participants performed tasks in which one type of option provided larger immediate rewards but the alternative type of option led to larger rewards on future trials, or improvements in state. We predicted that older adults would show a reduced preference for choices that led to improvements in state and a greater preference for choices that maximized immediate reward. We also predicted that fits from a hybrid reinforcement-learning model would indicate greater model-based strategy use in younger than in older adults. In line with these predictions, older adults selected the options that maximized reward more often than did younger adults in three of the four tasks, and modeling results suggested reduced model-based strategy use. In the task where older adults showed similar behavior to younger adults, our model-fitting results suggested that this was due to the utilization of a win-stay–lose-shift heuristic rather than a more complex model-based strategy. Additionally, within older adults, we found that model-based strategy use was positively correlated with memory measures from our neuropsychological test battery. We suggest that this shift from state-based to reward-based motivation may be due to age related declines in the neural structures needed for more computationally demanding model-based decision making.     

Quality of Family Relationships as Protective Factors of Eating Disorders: An Investigation Amongst Italian Teenagers

The study here presented aims to investigate the links between quality of family relationships and some prodromes in eating disorders. A sample of 1,083 subjects took part in the study by filling PBI, FACES and EDI questionnaires. In order to clarify the role played by family relationships in the onset of EDs, two subgroups (high risk–low risk) were individuated by using the EDI cut-offs as discriminator factors and tested separately from the main sample. The results revealed some significant relationships between the analysed dimensions. It was shown that by increasing the values from the parents’ caring style scale and the real family’s cohesiveness scale the probability for subjects to fall into the high risk group decreases. Also, by increasing the family adaptability’s values, an increase of the probability for subjects to fall into the high risk group occurs. These results support the implementation of preventive and therapeutic plans to promote health and quality of life of adolescence.     

Salience network response to changes in emotional expressions of others is heightened during early adolescence: relevance for social functioning

Adolescence is a unique developmental period when the salience of social and emotional information becomes particularly pronounced. Although this increased sensitivity to social and emotional information has frequently been considered with respect to risk behaviors and psychopathology, evidence suggests that increased adolescent sensitivity to social and emotional cues may confer advantages. For example, greater sensitivity to shifts in the emotions of others is likely to promote flexible and adaptive social behavior. In this study, a sample of 54 children and adolescents (age 8–19 years) performed a delayed match‐to‐sample task for emotional faces while undergoing fMRI scanning. Recruitment of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula when the emotion of the probe face did not match the emotion held in memory followed a quadratic developmental pattern that peaked during early adolescence. These findings indicate meaningful developmental variation in the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to changes in the emotional expressions. Across all participants, greater activation of this network for changes in emotional expression was associated with less social anxiety and fewer social problems. These results suggest that the heightened salience of social and emotional information during adolescence may confer important advantages for social behavior, providing sensitivity to others’ emotions that facilitates flexible social responding.     

The real thing: preschoolers prefer actual activities to pretend ones

Pretend play is a quintessential activity of early childhood, and adults supply children with many toys to encourage it. Do young children actually prefer to pretend, or do they do it because they are unable to engage in some activities for real? Here we examined, for nine different activities, American middle‐class preschoolers' preferences for pretend and real activities. The 100 children we tested (M = 58.5 months, range 36 to 82 months) overwhelmingly preferred real activities to pretend ones, and this preference increased from age 3 to age 4, then remained steady through age 6. Children provided cogent justifications for their preferences. The results are discussed with reference to other domains in which children show reality preferences and with respect to the content of preschool curricula.     

Experiences of patients undergoing repeated intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor injections for neovascular age-related macular degeneration

Current therapy to slow disease progression in patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) entails regular intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) injections, often indefinitely. Little is known about the burden imposed on patients by this repetitive treatment schedule and how this can be best managed. The aim of this study was to explore the psychosocial impact of repeated intravitreal injections on patients with neovascular AMD. Forty patients (16 males, 24 females) with neovascular AMD undergoing anti-VEGF treatment were recruited using purposive sampling from a private ophthalmology practice and public hospital in Melbourne. Patients were surveyed using the Macular Disease Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire (MacTSQ; Bradley, Health Psychology Research Unit, Surrey, England) and underwent semi-structured, one-on-one interviews. Interview topics were: treatment burden and satisfaction; tolerability; barriers to adherence; treatment motivation; and patient education. Interviews were audio recorded and thematic analysis performed using NVivo 10 (QSR International, Doncaster, Australia). Patients recognised the importance of treatment to preserve eyesight, yet experienced significant psychosocial and practical burden from the treatment schedule. Important issues included treatment-related anxiety, financial considerations and transport burden placed on relatives or carers. Many patients were restricted to sedentary activities post-injection owing to treatment side effects. Patients prioritised treatment, often sacrificing family, travel and social commitments owing to a fear of losing eyesight if treatment was not received. Whilst anti-VEGF injections represent the current mainstay of treatment for neovascular AMD, the ongoing treatment protocol imposes significant burden on patients. An understanding of the factors that contribute to the burden of treatment may help inform strategies to lessen its impact and assist patients to better manage the challenges of treatment.