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Spontaneous eye blinks during creative task correlate with divergent processing

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Abstract

Creativity consists of divergent and convergent thinking, with both related to individual eye blinks at rest. To assess underlying mechanisms between eye blinks and traditional creativity tasks, we investigated the relationship between creativity performance and eye blinks at rest and during tasks. Participants performed an alternative uses and remote association task while eye blinks were recorded. Results showed that the relationship between eye blinks at rest and creativity performance was compatible with those of previous research. Interestingly, we found that the generation of ideas increased as a function of eye blink number during the alternative uses task. On the other hand, during the remote association task, accuracy was independent of eye blink number during the task, but response time increased with it. Moreover, eye blink changes in participants who responded quickly during the remote association task were different depending on their resting state eye blinks; that is, participants with many eye blinks during rest showed little increasing eye blinks and achieved solutions quickly. Positive correlations between eye blinks during creative tasks and yielding ideas on the alternative uses task and response time on the remote association task suggest that eye blinks during creativity tasks relate to divergent thinking processes such as conceptual reorganization.

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Notes

  1. The AIC is a criterion for model selection; a model is better as the AIC becomes smaller. Usually, a model with a small AIC is selected.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Naito Foundation, a Grant-in-Aid from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS; #23500329), HAYAO NAKAYAMA Foundation for Science and Technology and Culture, and a research program affiliated with the Kokoro Research Center. We are deeply grateful to Sakiko Yoshikawa for valuable comments on this study.

Ethical standard

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The internal review board of Kyoto University approved the procedures, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to testing.

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Correspondence to Yoshiyuki Ueda.

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Ueda, Y., Tominaga, A., Kajimura, S. et al. Spontaneous eye blinks during creative task correlate with divergent processing. Psychological Research 80, 652–659 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0665-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0665-x

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