Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

This is the first handbook where the world’s foremost “experts on expertise” review our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts’ knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge of the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise, such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

This is a high impact journal published by Annual Reviews, Inc., a nonprofit scientific publisher established in 1929 to promote the advancement of the sciences through critical reviews. Covering all areas of psychology research and practice, the Annual Review of Psychology is planned by a rotating committee of eight distinguished psychologists who invite qualified authors to contribute reviews of significant developments in the discipline.

Annual Review of Psychology

Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications

It is increasingly acknowledged that creativity involves two phases: a generation phase and an evaluation phase. The two-fold model assumes a cyclic motion between the generation and the evaluation of ideas, as common or deviant ideas are rejected, and novel and appropriate ideas receive further attention and elaboration. Here we synthesize recent neuroimaging findings into an extended two-fold model, and emphasize the important role of the evaluation phase. The model aims to explain how different environmental processes, like expertise and enculturation, affect creativity. We further divide the evaluation phase into three sub stages: valuation, monitoring, and selection. We provide evidence for the model and suggest that creativity research would greatly benefit from incorporating the extended two-fold model into future research questions.

The two-fold model of creativity: the neural underpinnings of the generation and evaluation of creative ideas

The current study explored the influence of musical expertise, and specifically training in improvisation on creativity, using the framework of the twofold model, according to which creativity involves a process of idea generation and idea evaluation. Based on the hypothesis that a strict evaluation phase may have an inhibiting effect over the generation phase, we predicted that training in improvisation may have a “releasing effect” on the evaluation system, leading to greater creativity. To examine this hypothesis, we compared performance among three groups - musicians trained in improvisation, musicians not trained in improvisation, and non-musicians - on divergent thinking tasks and on their evaluation of creativity. The improvisation group scored higher on fluency and originality compared to the other two groups. Among the musicians, evaluation of creativity mediated how experience in improvisation was related to originality and fluency scores. It is concluded that deliberate practice of improvisation may have a “releasing effect” on creativity.

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Expertise in musical improvisation and creativity: the mediation of idea evaluation.

Human creative cognition is commonly described as a twofold cyclic process that involves an idea generation phase and an idea evaluation phase. Although the evaluation phase makes a crucial contribution to originality, its underlying mechanisms have not received sufficient research attention. Here, we suggest that the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) plays a major role in the interplay between the evaluation and generation networks and that inhibiting this region's activity may have an effect on "releasing" the generation neural network, resulting in greater originality. To examine the neural networks that mediate the generation and evaluation of ideas, we conducted an fMRI experiment on a group of healthy human participants (Study 1), in which we compared an idea generation task to an idea evaluation task. We found that evaluating the originality of ideas is indeed associated with a relative increase in lIFG activation, as opposed to generating original ideas. We further showed that temporarily inhibiting the lIFG using continuous theta-burst stimulation (Study 2) results in less strict evaluation on the one hand and increased originality scores on the other. Our findings provide converging evidence from multiple methods to show that the lIFG participates in evaluating the originality of ideas.

Donna Abecasis

Papers

Expertise in musical improvisation and creativity: the mediation of idea evaluation.

Participation of the left inferior frontal gyrus in human originality