Resisting classical solutions: The creative mind of industrial designers and engineers.

International audienceIndustrial designers and engineers are 2 types of individuals who are typically contrasted with regard to their creative capabilities. Regarding idea-generation processes, studies have shown that individuals use existing elements to generate new ideas, which constrains their creative thinking and leads them to only focus on a narrow scope of solutions. This article explores how industrial designers and engineers behave when generating creative ideas and resisting fixation (i.e., their propensity to focus on a limited set of ideas). We used a creative task in which participants were asked to design a solution that would prevent a hen’s egg from breaking after being dropped from a height of 10 m. Our results show that engineers and industrial designers differ in their creative behaviors when they are asked to generate ideas in a creative task without any constraints. Industrial designers provide more answers and are less fixated than engineers. However, for both engineers and industrial designers, the introduction of an uncreative example reinforced the fixation effect and constrained participants’ fluency. Specifically, industrial designers who were exposed to an uncreative example behaved similarly to engineers who were not exposed to this type of example

GARCÍA, HERMINIA MARGARITA [Material gráfico]

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 201

The Shift from Local to Global Visual Processing in 6-Year-Old Children Is Associated with Grey Matter Loss

International audienceBackground: A real-world visual scene consists of local elements (e.g. trees) that are arranged coherently into a global configuration (e.g. a forest). Children show psychological evolution from a preference for local visual information to an adult-like preference for global visual information, with the transition in visual preference occurring around 6 years of age. The brain regions involved in this shift in visual preference have not been described. Methods and Results: We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to study children during this developmental window to investigate changes in gray matter that underlie the shift from a bias for local to global visual information. Six-year-old children were assigned to groups according to their judgment on a global/local task. The first group included children who still presented with local visual processing biases, and the second group included children who showed global visual processing biases. VBM results indicated that compared to children with local visual processing biases, children with global visual processing biases had a loss of gray matter in the right occipital and parietal visuospatial areas. Conclusions: These anatomical findings are in agreement with previous findings in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and represent the first structural identification of brain regions that allow healthy children to develop a global perception of the visual world

How does social evaluation influence hot and cool inhibitory control in adolescence?

The aim of the present study is to examine whether in hot, i.e., affectively charged contexts, or cool, i.e., affectively neutral contexts, inhibitory control capacity increases or decreases under social evaluation in adolescents and adults. In two experiments, adolescents and young adults completed two Stroop-like tasks under either a social evaluation condition or a control condition. The social evaluation condition comprised the presence of a peer (Experiment 1) or an adult (Experiment 2) playing the role of an evaluator, while under the control condition, the task was performed alone. In the Cool Stroop task, participants had to refrain from reading color names to identify the ink color in which the words were printed. In the Hot Stroop task, participants had to determine the emotional expression conveyed by faces from the NimStim database while ignoring the emotion word displayed beneath. The results were similar in both experiments. In adolescents, social evaluation by a peer (Experiment 1) or by an adult (Experience 2) facilitated hot but not cool inhibitory control in adolescents. In adults, social evaluation had no effect on hot or cool inhibitory control. The present findings expand our understanding of the favorable influence of socioemotional context on hot inhibitory control during adolescence in healthy individuals

How does social evaluation influence hot and cool inhibitory control in adolescence?

The aim of the present study is to examine whether in hot, i.e., affectively charged contexts, or cool, i.e., affectively neutral contexts, inhibitory control capacity increases or decreases under social evaluation in adolescents and adults. In two experiments, adolescents and young adults completed two Stroop-like tasks under either a social evaluation condition or a control condition. The social evaluation condition comprised the presence of a peer (Experiment 1) or an adult (Experiment 2) playing the role of an evaluator, while under the control condition, the task was performed alone. In the Cool Stroop task, participants had to refrain from reading color names to identify the ink color in which the words were printed. In the Hot Stroop task, participants had to determine the emotional expression conveyed by faces from the NimStim database while ignoring the emotion word displayed beneath. The results were similar in both experiments. In adolescents, social evaluation by a peer (Experiment 1) or by an adult (Experience 2) facilitated hot but not cool inhibitory control in adolescents. In adults, social evaluation had no effect on hot or cool inhibitory control. The present findings expand our understanding of the favorable influence of socioemotional context on hot inhibitory control during adolescence in healthy individuals.</p

Development of Ambiguity Aversion from Early Adolescence to Adulthood: New Insights from the Ellsberg Paradox

These researches aim to clarify whether middle adolescents’ risk-taking is driven by reduced ambiguity aversion

Development of ambiguity aversion from early adolescence to adulthood: New insights from the Ellsberg paradox

This research aimed to clarify whether middle adolescents’ risk-taking is driven by reduced ambiguity aversion. In Study 1, we explored the development of ambiguity aversion using an adaptation of the classic Ellsberg paradox with early adolescents (10–11 years old), middle adolescents (14–16 years old), and young adults (20–25 years old). Study 2 examined the development of ambiguity aversion depending on the ambiguity level in middle adolescence compared with adults. These two studies revealed that only early adolescents did not demonstrate ambiguity aversion. In contrast, middle adolescents and adults showed strong ambiguity aversion irrespective of ambiguity level. These findings support the idea that the period of young adolescence could be the start of ambiguity aversion development, although this tendency to avoid ambiguous options is already developed in middle adolescence. This finding might have important public health implications and suggests that prevention campaigns should consider early adolescence to be a particularly vulnerable age group for risky behaviors.</jats:p