A Review of Experimental Research on Embodied Creativity: Revisiting the Mind–Body Connection

A growing body of experimental work highlights the potential value of unstructured, interactive, or spontaneous motions, including gestures, dance, shifting body postures, physical object-manipulation, drawing, etc. to favorably impact creative performance. However, despite these favorable findings, to our knowledge, no systematic review has been conducted to explore the totality of evidence for embodied activities in this arena. Thus, the objective of this paper was to systematically evaluate the potential effects of embodied experimental manipulations on traditionally assessed creativity outcomes. A systematic review was conducted utilizing PubMed, PsychInfo, Sports Discus, and Google Scholar databases. The 20 studies evaluated employed a variety of methodological approaches regarding study design, embodied manipulation, and selection of specific creativity outcomes. Despite these variations, embodied movement robustly enhanced creativity across nearly all studies (90%), with no studies showing a detrimental effect. Based on the evaluation of the studies reviewed, several common themes emerged. These included the relevance of symbolic metaphors and distributed embodied cognitions, selection of embodied modality, specific measurement considerations, as well as the importance for implementing true, inactive control conditions in embodied creativity research. This review expands on these findings and places them in the context of improving future embodied creativity research.     

Acquired equivalence and distinctiveness of cues using a sensory-preconditioning procedure

In Experiment 1 rats were presented with two flavours, A and B, that were accompanied either by a third common flavour, X, or by two different flavours, X and Y, respectively. An aversion was then established to A, and the extent to which this aversion generalized to B was measured. Stimulus generalization was found to be more marked when A and B had both been presented with the same flavour, X, during pre-exposure than when A and B had been presented with X and Y. In Experiment 2 three target flavours, A, B, and C, were initially presented. In one pre-exposure condition presentations of A and B were accompanied by X, and C was presented alone; in a second condition A and B were presented in isolation, and C was accompanied by X. After an aversion had been established to A, half of the animals in each of the pre-exposure conditions were tested with B, and the remainder were tested with C. In both of the pre-exposure conditions the generalized aversion was more substantial to B than to C. An analysis of these results in terms of the mechanisms that have been supposed to underlie sensory preconditioning is presented.