Componentman as vice-president: A reply to Pellegrino and Lyon's analysis of “the components of a componential analysis”

In a recent issue of Intelligence (1979, 3, 169–186), Pellegrino and Lyon provided a general review and critique of a set of methods for studying intelligence that have been referred to collectively as “componential analysis.” The present article contains a response to this critique as formulated by a shadowy character named “Componentman” (who of course wears a cape with a “C” on it) and as dictated to Robert Sternberg.     

Beyond Defiance: An Augmented Investment Perspective on Creativity

An investment perspective on creativity, proposed 30 years ago, no longer seems adequate, nor do various revisions of the model made since then. The world, or at least the way many people experience it, has changed and so have the challenges for creativity. In particular, creativity is being used to increasingly greater effect in negative ways and in ways that lack integrity with respect both to internal coherence and external correspondence to the world. To understand creativity and adequately teach it, people need to take into account its positivity and its integrity with respect to internal coherence and external correspondence.     

If dancers ate their shoes: Inductive reasoning with factual and counterfactual premises

This experiment addressed the effect of precue information, which may be either familiar or novel, and either relevant or irrelevant, on the solution of inductive reasoning problems. Sixty undergraduate students each completed 216 verbal inductive reasoning problems and five psychometric ability tests. The reasoning problems were equally divided among analogies, classifications, and series completions, with half of each kind of item presented in a standard, uncued format, and half presented with a precue. With respect to internal validation, it was found that for analogies and classifications, subjects take longer to process irrelevant than relevant information if the precue is familiar, but they take longer to process relevant than irrelevant information if the precue is novel. For series completions, this relation does not hold; rather, both novelty and irrelevance add time to the processing of information, with the time for irrelevance greater than that for novelty. The utility of precues for different tasks was explored, and it was found that familiar relevant precues facilitated solution of the more difficult kinds of items (classifications and series completions), but hampered solution of the easier, more automatically solved items (analogies). With respect to external validation, it was found that the nonentrenched induction tasks overlapped with psychometric tests in terms of abilities measured, that the abilities measured were fluid rather than crystallized, and that the precued (more nonentrenched) items were better measures of fluid abilities than were the uncued items.     

Advancing Creativity Theory and Research: A Socio-cultural Manifesto

This manifesto, discussed by 20 scholars, representing diverse lines of creativity research, marks a conceptual shift within the field. Socio-cultural approaches have made substantial contributions to the concept of creativity over recent decades and today can provide a set of propositions to guide our understanding of past research and to generate new directions of inquiry and practice. These propositions are urgently needed in response to the transition from the Information Society to the Post-Information Society. Through the propositions outlined here, we aim to build common ground and invite the community of creativity researchers and practitioners to reflect up, study, and cultivate creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon.     

When Your Race Is Almost Run,but You Feel You're Not Yet Done: Application of the Propulsion Theory of Creative Contributions to Late‐career Challenges

The propulsion theory of creative contributions is a theory that focuses on how a creative act or product builds on and adds to knowledge in various fields. In this article, we apply the propulsion theory of creative contributions not to creative discoveries or inventions, but rather to late‐career decisions about future directions in which one can steer one's career. We consider eight different kinds of career decisions one can make—replication, redefinition, forward incrementation, advance forward incrementation, redirection, reconstruction/redirection, reinitiation, and synthesis. Each offers a viable option for closing out a creative career.     

The development of adaptive competence: Why cultural psychology is necessary and not just nice

I argue that developmental psychologists need to view cultural approaches to cognitive development as necessary and not just nice. Cultural psychology enables one to study problems one otherwise might not be able to study and also to identify solutions to problems that might be obscured or even distorted if one looked only at results within a single culture (usually, one’s own). I describe work my colleagues and I have done around the world addressing specific problems such as what does it mean to be adaptively intelligent in various cultures, how does illness affect intellectual functioning, and what do people even mean by “intelligence” in different cultures. The results show that cognitive development can be fully understood only if one looks beyond one’s own cultural boundaries and preconceptions. The article further argues that a theory of successful intelligence can be a useful way of studying phenomena of intellectual development within a cultural framework.     

An Indicator of Suicidal Ideation on the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test

Hospitalized psychiatric patients responding on the Bender-Gestalt Test with the ‘penetration’ of Design 6 into Design 5, did display significantly more suicidal ideation in the predicted direction than did a matched control group (P < .005). The results were taken to suggest the utility of combining this variable with other predictive criteria derived from Rorschach research to help the clinician make recommendations about suicidally ideated psychiatric patients.     

Differentiating insight from non-insight problems

This study aimed to investigate whether a range of tasks that have been generally classed as requiring insight form an empirically separable group of tasks distinct from tasks generally classed as non-insight. In this study, 24 insight tasks, 10 non-insight tasks, and tests of individual differences in cognitive abilities and working memory were administered to 60 participants. Cluster analysis of the problem-solving tasks indicated that the presumed insight problems did tend to cluster with other presumed insight problems, and similarly the presumed non-insight problems tended to cluster with other presumed non-insight tasks. Performance on presumed insight problems was particularly linked to measures of ideational flexibility with a different pattern of results for the non-insight tasks. Spatial insight problems were linked to spatial flexibility and verbal insight tasks were linked to vocabulary scores. The results are discussed in relation to recent developments of dual process theories of thinking.