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Novelty and appropriateness are two fundamental components of creativity. However, the way in which novelty and appropriateness are separated at behavioral and neural levels remains poorly understood. In the present study, we aim to distinguish behavioral and neural bases of novelty and appropriateness of creative idea generation. In alignment with two established theories of creative thinking, which respectively, emphasize semantic association and executive control, behavioral results indicate that novelty relies more on associative abilities, while appropriateness relies more on executive functions. Next, employing a connectome predictive modeling (CPM) approach in resting-state fMRI data, we define two functional network-based models—dominated by interactions within the default network and by interactions within the limbic network—that respectively, predict novelty and appropriateness (i.e., cross-brain prediction). Furthermore, the generalizability and specificity of the two functional connectivity patterns are verified in additional resting-state fMRI and task fMRI. Finally, the two functional connectivity patterns, respectively mediate the relationship between semantic association/executive control and novelty/appropriateness. These findings provide global and predictive distinctions between novelty and appropriateness in creative idea generation. 

Women reliably perform worse than men on measures of spatial ability, particularly those involving mental rotation. At the same time, females also report higher levels of spatial anxiety than males. What remains unclear, however, is whether and in what ways gender differences in these cognitive and affective aspects of spatial processing may be interrelated. Here, we tested for robust gender differences across six different datasets in spatial ability and spatial anxiety (N = 1257, 830 females). Further, we tested for bidirectional mediation effects. We identified indirect relations between gender and spatial skills through spatial anxiety, as well as between gender and spatial anxiety through spatial skills. In the gender → spatial anxiety → spatial ability direction, spatial anxiety explained an average of 22.4% of gender differences in spatial ability. In the gender → spatial ability → spatial anxiety direction, spatial ability explained an average of 25.9% of gender differences in spatial anxiety. Broadly, these results support a strong relation between cognitive and affective factors when explaining gender differences in the spatial domain. However, the nature of this relation may be more complex than has been assumed in previous literature. On a practical level, the results of this study caution the development of interventions to address gender differences in spatial processing which focus primarily on either spatial anxiety or spatial ability until such further research can be conducted. Our results also speak to the need for future longitudinal work to determine the precise mechanisms linking cognitive and affective factors in spatial processing. 

Abstract Identifying ways to enable people to reach their creative potential is a core goal of creativity research with implications for education and professional attainment. Recently, we identified a potential barrier to creative achievement: creativity anxiety (i.e., anxiety specific to creative thinking). Initial work found that creativity anxiety is associated with fewer real-world creative achievements. However, the more proximal impacts of creativity anxiety remain unexplored. In particular, understanding how to overcome creativity anxiety requires understanding how creativity anxiety may or may not impact creative cognitive performance, and how it may relate to state-level anxiety and effort while completing creative tasks. The present study sought to address this gap by measuring creativity anxiety alongside several measures of creative performance, while concurrently surveying state-level anxiety and effort. Results indicated that creativity anxiety was, indeed, predictive of poor creative performance, but only on some of the tasks included. We also found that creativity anxiety predicted both state anxiety and effort during creative performance. Interestingly, state anxiety and effort did not explain the associations between creativity anxiety and creative performance. Together, this work suggests that creativity anxiety can often be overcome in the performance of creative tasks, but likewise points to increased state anxiety and effort as factors that may make creative performance and achievement fragile in more demanding real-world contexts. 

Reasoning is a complex form of human cognition whose nature has long been debated. While a number of neurocognitive mechanisms for deductive reasoning have been offered, one of the most prominent accounts is Mental Model Theory (MMT). According to MMT, humans are able to manipulate and represent information for reasoning and problem solving by leveraging the brain’s evolved visuospatial resources. Thus, when solving deductive reasoning problems, reasoners build “mental models” of the essential pieces of information conveyed in the premises, with their relations to each other represented spatially—even when the information contained within a reasoning problem is not intrinsically spatial. Crucially, taking a spatially-based approach, such as building mental models, supports higher accuracy on deductive reasoning problems. However, no study has empirically tested whether explicitly training this mental modeling ability leads to improved deductive reasoning performance.