Carola Salvi

Sudden insight is associated with shutting out visual inputs.

Creative ideas seem often to appear when we close our eyes, stare at a blank wall, or gaze out of a window—all signs of shutting out distractions and turning attention inward. Prior research has demonstrated that attention-related brain areas are differently active when people solve problems with sudden insight (the Aha! phenomenon), relative to deliberate, analytic solving. We directly investigated the relationship between attention deployment and problem solving by recording eye movements and blinks, which are overt indicators of attention, as people solved short, visually presented problems. In the preparation period, before problems eventually solved by insight, participants blinked more frequently and longer, and made fewer fixations, than before problems eventually solved by analysis. Immediately prior to solutions, participants blinked longer and looked away from the problem more often when solving by insight than when solving analytically. These phenomena extend prior research with a direct demonstration of dynamic differences in attention as people solve problems with sudden insight versus analytically.

Looking for Creativity: Where Do We Look When We Look for New Ideas?

Recent work using the eye movement monitoring technique has demonstrated that when people are engaged in thought they tend to disengage from the external world by blinking or fixating on an empty portion of the visual field, such as a blank wall, or out the window at the sky. This ‘looking at nothing’ behavior has been observed during thinking that does not explicitly involve visual imagery (mind wandering, insight in problem solving, memory encoding and search) and it is associated with reduced analysis of the external visual environment. Thus, it appears to indicate (and likely facilitate) a shift of attention from external to internal stimuli that benefits creativity and problem solving by reducing the cognitive load and enhancing attention to internally evolving activation. We briefly mention some possible reasons to collect eye movement data in future studies of creativity.

Validation of Italian rebus puzzles and compound remote associate problems

Rebus puzzles and compound remote associate problems have been successfully used to study problem solving. These problems are physically compact, often can be solved within short time limits, and have unambiguous solutions, and English versions have been normed for solving rates and levels of difficulty. Many studies on problem solving with sudden insight have taken advantage of these features in paradigms that require many quick solutions (e.g., solution priming, visual hemifield presentations, electroencephalography, fMRI, and eyetracking). In order to promote this vein of research in Italy, as well, we created and tested Italian versions of both of these tests. The data collected across three studies yielded a pool of 88 rebus puzzles and 122 compound remote associate problems within a moderate range of difficulty. This article provides both sets of problems with their normative data, for use in future research.

The effects of crowding on eye movement patterns in reading

Crowding is a phenomenon that characterizes normal periphery limiting letter identification when other letters surround the signal. We investigated the nature of the reading limitation of crowding by analyzing eye-movement patterns. The stimuli consisted of two items varying across trials for letter spacing (spaced, unspaced and increased size), lexicality (words or pseudowords), number of letters (4, 6, 8), and reading modality (oral and silent). In Experiments 1 and 2 (oral and silent reading, respectively) the results show that an increase in letter spacing induced an increase in the number of fixations and in gaze duration, but a reduction in the first fixation duration. More importantly, increasing letter size (Experiment 3) produced the same first fixation duration advantage as empty spacing, indicating that, as predicted by crowding, only center-to-center letter distance, and not spacing per se, matters. Moreover, when the letter size was enlarged the number of fixations did not increase as much as in the previous experiments, suggesting that this measure depends on visual acuity rather than on crowding. Finally, gaze duration, a measure of word recognition, did not change with the letter size enlargement. No qualitative differences were found between oral and silent reading experiments (1 and 2), indicating that the articulatory process did not influence the outcome. Finally, a facilitatory effect of lexicality was found in all conditions, indicating an interaction between perceptual and lexical processing. Overall, our results indicate that crowding influences normal word reading by means of an increase in first fixation duration, a measure of word encoding, which we interpret as a modulatory effect of attention on critical spacing.

Intelligence across the seventh decade in patients with brain injuries acquired in young adulthood

In this longitudinal study, we examined intelligence in a group of Vietnam veterans in their 60 s who suffered combat-related penetrating traumatic brain injuries (pTBI) in their 20 s (n = 120), as well as matched veterans with no brain damage (n = 33). Intelligence was evaluated using the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) administered before the injury occurred and then again at three points in time over the following 45 years. We tested for potential predictors and correlates of late midlife intelligence score, as well as the recent change in score over the seventh decade. The pTBI group had lower intelligence scores than the control group when currently evaluated. Pre-injury intelligence and the presence of a pTBI were the most consistent predictors of current intelligence scores. While exacerbated intellectual decline occurs following a young-adulthood pTBI and affects everyday life, no evidence for late midlife accelerated cognitive decline or dementia was found.

The effects of expected reward on creative problem solving

Creative problem solving involves search processes, and it is known to be hard to motivate. Reward cues have been found to enhance performance across a range of tasks, even when cues are presented subliminally, without being consciously detected. It is uncertain whether motivational processes, such as reward, can influence problem solving. We tested the effect of supraliminal and subliminal reward on participant performance on problem solving that can be solved by deliberate analysis or by insight. Forty-one participants attempted to solve 100 compound remote associate problems. At the beginning of each problem, a potential reward cue (1 or 25 cents) was displayed, either subliminally (17 ms) or supraliminally (100 ms). Participants earned the displayed reward if they solved the problem correctly. Results showed that the higher subliminal reward increased the percentage of problems solved correctly overall. Second, we explored if subliminal rewards preferentially influenced solutions that were achieved via a sudden insight (mostly processed below awareness) or via a deliberate analysis. Participants solved more problems via insight following high subliminal reward when compared with low subliminal reward, and compared with high supraliminal reward, with no corresponding effect on analytic solving. Striatal dopamine (DA) is thought to influence motivation, reinforce behavior, and facilitate cognition. We speculate that subliminal rewards activate the striatal DA system, enhancing the kinds of automatic integrative processes that lead to more creative strategies for problem solving, without increasing the selectivity of attention, which could impede insight.