Criterial problems in creative cognition research

In creative cognition research, the Romantic view about creative cognition is traditionally rejected in favor of the modern view. The modern view about creative cognition maintains that creativity is neither mysterious nor unintelligible and that it is indeed susceptible to analysis. The paradigmatic objects of analysis in creative cognition research have been creative output and the creative process. The degree of creativity of an output is assessed in accordance with certain criterial definitions. The degree of creativity of a cognitive process is assessed in accordance with certain models of creative cognition, psychometric test measures, and neuroimaging studies that are grounded in certain criteria for assessment. The reliance on criterial definitions and criteria for assessment in analyzing either the creative output or the creative process suggests that creative cognition researchers remain under the sway of the classical, bundles-of-criteria theory of meaning. In this paper, I will critically evaluate the criterial problems that confront both criterial definitions and criteria for assessment before proposing an alternative theory of meaning.     

Tangible words are recognized faster: the grounding of meaning in sensory and perceptual systems

Sensory experience rating (SER), a new variable motivated by the grounded cognition framework of conceptual processing (e.g., Barsalou, 2008 ), indexes the degree to which a word evokes sensory/perceptual experiences. In the present study, SERs were collected for over 2,850 words. While SER is correlated with imageability, age of acquisition, and word frequency, the latter variables (along with seven others) account for less than 30% of the variance in SER. Reanalyses of two large-scale studies demonstrate that SER significantly predicts lexical decision times when other established predictor variables are statistically controlled. These results suggest that conceptual processing is grounded in sensory systems. Additionally, a major benefit of this variable is that it allows psycholinguistic researchers to examine semantic-perceptual links for all word classes with a single rating.     

Semantic size does not matter: "bigger" words are not recognized faster

Sereno, O'Donnell, and Sereno (2009) reported that words are recognized faster in a lexical decision task when their referents are physically large than when they are small, suggesting that "semantic size" might be an important variable that should be considered in visual word recognition research and modelling. We sought to replicate their size effect, but failed to find a significant latency advantage in lexical decision for "big" words (cf. "small" words), even though we used the same word stimuli as Sereno et al. and had almost three times as many subjects. We also examined existing data from visual word recognition megastudies (e.g., English Lexicon Project) and found that semantic size is not a significant predictor of lexical decision performance after controlling for the standard lexical variables. In summary, the null results from our lab experiment--despite a much larger subject sample size than Sereno et al.--converged with our analysis of megastudy lexical decision performance, leading us to conclude that semantic size does not matter for word recognition. Discussion focuses on why semantic size (unlike some other semantic variables) is unlikely to play a role in lexical decision.     

Observing neighborhood effects without neighbors

With a new metric called phonological Levenshtein distance (PLD20), the present study explores the effects of phonological similarity and word frequency on spoken word recognition, using polysyllabic words that have neither phonological nor orthographic neighbors, as defined by neighborhood density (the N-metric). Inhibitory effects of PLD20 were observed for these lexical hermits: Close-PLD20 words were recognized more slowly than distant PLD20 words, indicating lexical competition. Importantly, these inhibitory effects were found only for low- (not high-) frequency words, in line with previous findings that phonetically related primes inhibit recognition of low-frequency words. These results indicate that the properties of PLD20--a continuous measure of word-form similarity--make it a promising new metric for quantifying phonological distinctiveness in spoken word recognition research.     

Validity of a Brief Measure of Parental Affective Attitudes in High-Risk Preschoolers

The current study investigated psychometric properties of the Family Affective Attitude Rating Scale (FAARS) for assessing parents' thoughts and feelings about their child, coded from a 5-min speech sample. Parental affective attitudes derive from previous experiences of parenting and child behavior, representations of the parent-child relationship and broader parental characteristics. Data were collected from mother-child dyads at ages 2 and 3 (N?=?731; 49?% female) from a multi-ethnic and high-risk community sample. Multi-informant observations of parenting and questionnaire measures were used to test construct and discriminant validity. FAARS showed good internal consistency and high inter-rater agreement. Affective attitudes were related to mothers' perceptions of their daily hassles, their reports of conflict with their child, and observed measures of positive and harsh parenting. Negative affective attitudes uniquely predicted later child problem behavior, over and above maternal reports of and observed measures of parenting. Overall, results support the validity of FAARS coding in mothers of preschoolers, a previously untested group. FAARS is a novel measure, directly assessing maternal perceptions of the parent-child relationship, and indirectly providing an index of maternal affect, stress, and depressive symptoms. Its brevity and cost-effectiveness further enhance the potential use of the FAARS measure for clinical and research settings.