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The study aims to estimate the impact of the video game "Fall Guys" on the convergent and divergent cognitive processes of players with different levels of gaming experience. Convergent processes assessed included short-term memory, selective attention, and mental inhibition. The indicator of divergent processes was verbal fluency. Among 203 surveyed students from the first year of psychology faculties, 147 later participated in the experimental study where 74 participants completed cognitive tests before and after playing the video game, while 73 participants completed tests before and after reading popular science texts printed on a paper blank. The gaming condition involved the popular arcade game "Fall Guys." The battery of cognitive tests included a short-term memory assessment, the Eriksen Flanker Task, the SART task, a short version of J. Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, the Guilford Unusual Uses Test, and the Deary-Liewald Task. A total of four sessions were completed based on the number of cognitive indicators. Participants with regular gaming experience showed higher scores in fluid intelligence, reaction speed, verbal fluency, and abilities related to selective attention and mental inhibition compared to non-players. However, short-term video game experience (compared to reading popular science texts) led to a decline in selective attention and mental inhibition but positively affected verbal creativity scores. Therefore, no positive short-term effect of video gaming on convergent processes was identified, though it was observed for verbal fluency scores. The significant differences in cognitive indicators between gamers and non-gamers allow for the discussion of these results in terms of the potential long-term effects of video games on both convergent and divergent processes.

Incubation is a period during which a subject temporarily makes no conscious attempts to solve a problem but eventually arrives at a solution. Henri Poincaré described cases where insights came after a break from working on complex mathematical problems. This article proposes a hypothesis called the «Poincaré effect»: the higher a person's creativity, the more pronounced the effect of incubation in their creative process. An experimental study was conducted with 525 participants divided into a control group (without incubation) and an experimental group (with an incubation break). Participants performed the «Alternate Uses» test, inventing non-standard ways to use a matchstick. Creativity was assessed based on fluency (the number of ideas) and originality. The results showed that the incubation break led to a significant increase in the fluency of responses in the experimental group. Moreover, among participants with a high level of creativity, incubation contributed to an increase in the originality of responses, confirming the Poincaré effect. These findings align with the awareness model, according to which incubation helps restructure the problem representation and recognize previously found unconscious solutions. The study's conclusions confirm the presence of the Poincaré effect in the phenomenon of incubation and highlight the importance of individual creative abilities in the problem-solving process.

The issue of incubation is a central and paradoxical topic in the psychology of thinking and creativity. The paradox arises from the observation that problem-solving can advance during periods when the solver is not consciously focused on the problem but is instead engaged in unrelated activities. Despite extensive research on incubation, a unified explanation for this phenomenon remains elusive. This article introduces a new theoretical approach characterized by two distinctive features. First, it advocates for the examination of the general problem of incubation through tasks that facilitate a precise analysis of the underlying processes—specifically, Mednick's triads. Second, to enable a comprehensive analysis of problem-solving processes, this approach incorporates methods from general network theory. Consequently, the theoretical model developed to elucidate incubation encompasses two levels of processes: the propagation of activation across the semantic network and the control processes driven by goal-setting when the individual accepts the problem.

The present study is focused on the measurement of the game efficiency by the younger adolescences in the individual and collaborative game problem solving conditions. The previously elaborated computer game system “PL-modified” was used. Social and emotional intelligence as well as gender factor were additionally controlled. 189 middle-school students from the 5—6th grades participated in this study. The results showed that game efficiency was higher in collaborative problem solving conditions (in comparison with the individual game) no matter which additional factor was controlled. Furthermore, the whole sample was divided in two groups by the criterion of the level of social intelligence of those participants who played in each pair. Thus, the group 1 included players with the equal level of social intelligence whereas the group 2 was presented by the gamers with the different levels of social intelligence. The pairs form the group 1 outperformed those participants from the group 2 in their game efficiency. Another independent resul concerns significant impact of social intelligence on the game performance in the pairs of boys. Emotional intelligence demonstrated only one significant positive correlation with the one parameter of game efficiency in the individual conditions. The present results are discussed in terms of the prospects of the usage of ‘PL- modified’ computer game system in the psychological studies conducted on the sample of young adolescents and taking their cognitive abilities into account.

In the current work we aimed to detect the incubation effect using between-subject and within-subject design. We compared the performance rate of solving Remote Association Test in incubation (with a break) and no-incubation conditions. During the incubation phase participants were listening to the audio record of the science-fiction novel. No significant differences were found in the performance level in incubation and no-incubation conditions, neither in within-group nor in the between-group tests. Nonetheless we found the indirect indicators of the processes that are encountered during the incubation period. The discrepancy in the absence of raw performance indicators of incubation on the one hand, and the presence of the difficulty indicators changes on another hand, is discussed in the context of the activation paradigm and the model of awareness of implicit solution.

Presented is the method of patterns to diagnose subjects basing on testing paths which represent results of completion of tasks in the order of their appearance. This method allows solving diagnostics tasks having limited observation results, building diagnostics conclusions only relying on the analysis of accumulated empirical data and changing adaptively both the number of presented testing tasks and their content to attain the given level of diagnostic assessment reliability.