Aleksandra Gruszka

Priming and Acceptance of Close and Remote Associations by Creative and Less Creative People

ABSTRACT: This study examined the relationships between creativity and associative memory processes. Participants were shown pairs of words, with the instruction to say yes if they could discern any associative connection between the words, or no otherwise. The second word of every pair was preceded by exposition of a prime (200 ms). Positive primes were based on meaning or spelling similarity with the target word, whereas neutral control primes were either unrelated words or nonsensical letter strings. Creative people differed from less creative people in readiness to accept word associations and susceptibility to priming. Two bottom-up cognitive explanations of the outcomes of this study are supplemented with 2 top-down explanations, pertaining to the motivational processes.

Insightful Imagery is Related to Working Memory Updating

Available body of evidence concerning the relationship between insight problem solving and working memory (WM) is ambiguous. Several authors propose that restructuring of the problem representation requires controlled search processes, which needs planning and involvement of WM. Other researchers suggest that the restructuring is achieved through the automatic spread of activation in long-term memory, assigning a limited role to WM capacity. In the present study we examined the correlations between insight problem solving performance and measures of WM updating function (n-back task), including general intelligence (as measured by Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices). The results revealed that updating function shared up to 30% of variance with the insight problem task performance, even when the influence of general mental ability was controlled for. These results suggest that insight problem solving is constrained by individual ability to update the content of WM.

Normal aging and Parkinson's disease are associated with the functional decline of distinct frontal-striatal circuits.

Impaired ability to shift attention between stimuli (i.e. shifting attentional ‘set’) is a well-established part of the dysexecutive syndrome in Parkinsons Disease (PD), nevertheless cognitive and neural bases of this deficit remain unclear. In this study, an fMRI-optimised variant of a classic paradigm for assessing attentional control (Hampshire and Owen 2006) was used to contrast activity in dissociable executive circuits in early-stage PD patients and controls. The results demonstrated that the neural basis of the executive performance impairments in PD is accompanied by hypoactivation within the striatum, anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), and inferior frontal sulcus (IFS) regions. By contrast, in aging it is associated with hypoactivation of the anterior insula/inferior frontal operculum (AI/FO) and the pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA). Between group behavioural differences were also observed; whereas normally aging individuals exhibited routine-problem solving deficits, PD patients demonstrated more global task learning deficits. These findings concur with recent research demonstrating model-based reinforcement learning deficits in PD and provide evidence that the AI/FO and IFS circuits are differentially impacted by PD and normal aging.

Learned Irrelevance Revisited: Pathology-Based Individual Differences, Normal Variation and Neural Correlates

The function of the human executive system can broadly be described as the seeking out and processing of those signals and memories that are of the greatest relevance when guiding deliberate and adaptive behaviours. This task is not easy, however, since it requires almost constant shifting of attention in response to irregular alterations in the contingencies relating stimuli, responses, and environmental feedback. An individual’s current belief regarding these contingencies guides response within a given context, and the representation of this belief and its consequent behaviour is often referred to as an “attentional set”. Consequently, attentional set-shifting is an important executive function responsible for altering a behavioural response in reaction to the changing contingencies (Cools, Barker, Sahakian, & Robbins, 2001; Gotham, Brown, & Marsden, 1986). Such flexibility underlies a wide range of behaviours: the better the set-shifting capacity, the more flexible the person is at adapting to change. At the other end of this continuum are many psychiatric groups, neurodegenerative groups and even healthy elderly and young subjects that have been shown repeatedly to be impaired in attentional set-shifting performance. One specific form of these impairments lies in an inability to attend to, or to learn about, information which has previously been shown to be irrelevant. This phenomenon called learned irrelevance (LI) (Mackintosh, 1973) is very mysterious, because unlike other aspects of attentional set-shifting, it appears to be neither dependent on the frontal lobe (e.g. Owen et al., 1993) nor affected by dopamine (Owen et al., 1993; Slabosz et al., 2006), and, therefore, may not be coded for in the parts of the brain that are typically considered “executive” at all.

Conclusion: The State of the Art in Research on Individual Differences in Executive Control and Cognition

The chapters in this book illustrate the richness and diversity of research on individual differences (IDs) in executive control. Our aim in this summary chapter is to identify some of the major themes in this research area, and to discuss how the various chapters address these themes. This chapter is not intended to provide a general synthesis of the field, which would be premature. The reader is referred to the preceding chapters and the commentary sections for the various theoretical perspectives on IDs in executive control. The chapter is organized around three sets of topics. First, we outline the major research issues that provide the foundation for the study of IDs in executive control. Next, we identify some areas of reasonable consensus, at least in terms of general approaches (although significant differences in detail may remain). We finish with a survey of some areas of controversy, where some more fundamental differences between researchers may reside.

The (In)significance of Executive Functions for the Trait of Self-Control: A Psychometric Study

Self-control (SC) is an individual trait defined as the ability to pursue long-distance goals in spite of the obstacles generated by current desires, innate or learned automatisms, and physiological needs of an organism. This trait is relatively stable across the life span and it predicts such important features as level of income, quality of social relationships, and proneness to addictions. It is widely believed that the cognitive substrate of SC involves the executive functions (EFs), such as inhibitory control, shifting of attention, and working memory updating. However, the empirical evidence concerning the relationships between trait SC and EFs is not convincing. The present study aims to address two questions: (1) what is the strength of relationships between trait SC and EFs, and (2) which aspects of SC are predicted by particular EFs, if at all. In order to answer these questions, we carried out a psychometric study with 296 participants (133 men and 163 women, mean age 23.31, SD 3.64), whom we investigated with three types of tools: (1) a battery SC scales and inventories, (2) a battery of EFs tasks, and (3) two general intelligence tests. Structural equation modeling approach was used to analyze the data. We found that the latent variables representing SC and the latent variable representing EFs did not show any relationship. The standardized path coefficient between EFs and general intelligence turned out rather strong. We conclude that the trait of SC, measured with questionnaires, does not depend on the strength of cognitive control, measured with EFs tasks.

Individual Differences in Cognition from a Neurophysiological Perspective: The Commentaries

We think this is an open empirical question. A good analogy is the concept of general intelligence, which has been the focus of many recent neuroscience studies. It is ultimately an empirical question as to whether intelligence is best described as a single monolithic construct or in terms of narrower lower-order abilities (e.g., visuospatial ability, verbal intelligence, etc.). Some studies have found important brain structural and functional correlates of general intelligence, when treated as a monolithic construct (e.g., Thompson). However, other work has led potential to refinement or revision of the construct (e.g., placing focus on lower-level processes, such as interference control). The concept of arousal has received less attention in cognitive neuroscience research, but the situation may nevertheless be similar. Is there a monolithic arousal system in the brain? Perhaps not, just as few people would argue that there is a single “intelligence system”; on the other hand, we suspect that when arousal is operationalized in relatively general ways – e.g., in terms of individuals’ propensity to respond to emotional stimuli, their basal activity level, etc. – there will be identifiable neural correlates.