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Recent works suggest that striking a balance between maximizing idea stimulation and minimizing idea redundancy can elevate novel idea generation performances in self-organizing social networks. We explore whether dispersing the visibility of high-performing idea generators can help achieve such a trade-off. We employ popularity signals (follower counts) of participants as an external source of variation in network structures, which we control across four conditions in a randomized setting. We observe that popularity signals influence inspiration-seeking ties, partly by biasing people’s perception of their peers’ novel idea-generation performances. Networks that partially disperse the top ideators’ visibility using this external signal show reduced idea redundancy and elevated idea-generation performances. However, extreme dispersal leads to inferior performances by narrowing the range of idea stimulation. Our work holds future-of-work implications for elevating idea generation performances of people.

Face perception abilities in humans exhibit a marked expertise in distinguishing individual human faces at the expense of individual faces from other species (the other-species effect). In particular, one behavioural effect of such specialization is that human adults search for and find categories of non-human faces faster and more accurately than a specific non-human face, and vice versa for human faces. However, a recent visual search study showed that neural responses (event-related potentials, ERPs) were identical when finding either a non-human or human face. We used time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis of the EEG data from that study to investigate the dynamics of neural representations during a visual search for own-species (human) or other-species (non-human ape) faces, with greater sensitivity than traditional ERP analyses. The location of each target (i.e., right or left) could be decoded from the EEG, with similar accuracy for human and non-human faces. However, the neural patterns associated with searching for an exemplar versus a category target differed for human faces compared to non-human faces: Exemplar representations could be more reliably distinguished from category representations for human than non-human faces. These findings suggest that the other-species effect modulates the nature of representations, but preserves the attentional selection of target items based on these representations.