Fluid Movement and Creativity Pilot Experiments
Fluid Movement and Creativity Pilot Experiments
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M. Slepian;N. Ambady;L. Slepian
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作者:
M. Slepian;N. Ambady;L. Slepian
Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation, cognitive flexibility, and remote associations. Alternative mechanisms such as enhanced mood and motivation were also examined. These results suggest that creativity can be influenced by certain types of physical movement. Theories of creativity describe creative thinking and intelligence as fluid (Hofstadter, 1995; Sternberg, 1985), likening thought to the movement of fluids: moving flexibly and smoothly in any direction with fluency or ease. Such language reflects a metaphor for thinking about creative thought. For instance, creative thought is often contrasted with analytical thought, which is more rigid and precise; a fluid can move in multiple directions with ease, and the ability to fluently and flexibly generate multiple thoughts is essential for creativity (Guilford, 1967). Fluid thinking, thus, is a metaphor for certain elements of creativity (Hofstadter, 1995). assert that abstract concepts are metaphorically grounded in concrete experience. For example, the abstract concept of importance might be understood via the metaphor " weighty, " which references the concrete sensation of holding something heavy. Indeed, participants who held a heavy, relative to a light, clipboard judged a variety of issues and items as having greater are grounded in bodily movement and sensation. This growing body of work has demonstrated that cognitive content (concepts) can be metaphorically embodied in sensorimotor systems (Lan-dau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010)—showing that the body provides a scaffold for abstract concepts (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). A separate body of work also demonstrates that gestures influence thought processes (e.g., Casasanto, 2011; Goldin-Meadow & Beilock, 2010). Gestures, for instance, can aid in spatial representation by allowing direct expression of spatial properties, lessening the need for a translation to verbal codes, and therefore alleviating working memory resources (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008), consequently improving spatial problem solving and enhancing speech fluency (Goldin-Meadow & Beilock, 2010). Additionally, motor experience can also change cognitive processes. For instance, right-handers evaluate items on the right more positively, whereas left-handers prefer items on the left (Casasanto, 2009), a likely result of the positive valence of motor fluency (e. suggested that the body can influence cognitive processes by means of metaphor, whereby cognitive–linguistic analyses suggested a role for the body in …