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Creative idea generation engages complex cognitive functions such as working memory capacity (WMC). The relationship between creativity and WMC has remained inconsistent due to the lack of experime...

Emotional conflict adaptation is an important process of cognitive control in human behavioral regulation. The face-word Stroop task and the emotional Simon task were employed to explore the correlation between fluid intelligence and neural processes of emotional conflict adaptation using event-related potential (ERP) techniques. Thirty-two intellectually average children (mean age of 10.72 years) and thirty-four intellectually gifted children (mean age of 10.86 years) participated in the present study. The behavioral results indicated that both intellectually gifted and average children showed reliable emotional conflict adaptation effects (CAEs) on reaction times (RTs) and error rates. However, the two IQ groups differed in the magnitude of error rates during emotional conflict adaptation. The electrophysiological results further revealed that the IQ differences in emotional conflict adaptation were mainly associated with emotional conflict detection processes as demonstrated by the frontal N2-CAE values. The two IQ groups did not differ in early P3 or late P3 responses during emotional conflict resolution processes. The gifted and average children showed different patterns during cognitive control processes when facing emotional Simon conflicts and emotional Stroop conflicts. The current study emphasizes the importance of frontal function during cognitive control of emotional information from the perspective of individual differences.

Children are found to exhibit high degrees of delay discounting compared with adults in many delay discounting studies, which might be due to the asynchronous development of “bottom-up” and “top-down” neural systems. However, the temporal dynamics associated with the two systems in the development of delay discounting processes are not well known. In this study, we chose two age groups of participants and adopted event-related potential (ERP) techniques to investigate the neural dynamic differences between children and adults during delay discounting processes. Behavioral findings showed that children discounted more than adults and chose more immediate choices. Electrophysiological findings revealed that children exhibited longer neural processing (longer P2 latency) than adults during the early detection and identification phase. Children showed less cognitive control (smaller N2 amplitude) than adults over the middle frontal areas, and they devoted more neural effort (larger P3 amplitudes) to making final choices than adults. The factors of reward amount and time delay could influence the development of delay discounting in children.

This study examined the effects of fluid intelligence and trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) on academic performance in primary school-aged intellectually gifted and average children (8–11 years of age). One hundred and four average children and eighty gifted children were administered a Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices and a Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Child Form. The results demonstrated that intellectually gifted children showed better academic performance than did average children in math, Chinese and English. Fluid intelligence and trait EI played different roles in predicting gifted and average children’s academic performance, particularly in math and Chinese. Specifically, gifted children’s academic performance was associated only with fluid intelligence, whereas average children’s academic performance was related to both fluid intelligence and trait EI; trait EI had an incremental validity after controlling for fluid intelligence in predicting the average children’s academic performance. The present study enhances our understanding of how cognitive and emotional abilities interact in intellectually gifted and average children’s academic performance.

Objective This study explored behavioral and electrophysiological age-related changes in conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli among children, adolescents, and young adults. Method Children (N = 35, Mage = 10.72 years), adolescents (N = 35, Mage = 13.34 years), and young adults (N = 30, Mage = 21.82 years) were administered cognitive control tasks on emotional stimulus-stimulus (S-S) conflict and stimulus-response (S-R) conflict while event-related potential (ERP) signals were recorded. Results The behavioral results (response time [RT] and error rate) showed that all age groups exhibited reliable conflict adaptation effect (CAE) to emotional stimuli, and conflict adaptation performance improved with age. A similar developmental pattern was observed when the ERP magnitudes of the CAE to emotional stimuli (N2 amplitude, N2 latency, and early P3 latency) were compared. Participants performed better on conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli when compared with the S-R stimuli (RT-CAE, N2 amplitude-CAE and late P3 amplitude-CAE), and only children performed better conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli than on S-R stimuli in terms of error rates. Conclusion Children, adolescents, and young adults all presented reliable behavioral and electrophysiological conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli, and participants exhibited improved performance on conflict adaptation with age across the 3 age groups in emotional contexts. Moreover, all the age groups showed distinct cognitive control of emotional S-S and S-R conflict, and conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli may mature earlier than S-R conflict. This study offers insight into how the processing of emotional stimuli affects cognitive control processes from a developmental perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Recently, the integrated control hypothesis (Lu et al., 2020) was proposed to explain the relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and attentional resource allocation. This hypothesis suggested that individuals with higher Gf tend to flexibly and adaptively allocate their limited resources according to the task type and task difficulty rather than simply exert more or fewer resources in any conditions. To examine this hypothesis, the present study used electroencephalogram (EEG) indicators (i.e., frontal theta-ERS and parietal-occipital alpha-ERD) as the measurement of participants’ resource allocation during the exploration task and exploitation task with different difficulties. The results found that higher Gf individuals tend to allocate fewer resources in all difficulty levels in the exploitation task compared to average Gf participants. In contrast, in the exploration task, higher Gf participants would allocate more resources in the medium- and high-difficulty levels than average Gf participants, but this phenomenon was only found in males. These findings provided supportive evidence for the integrated control hypothesis that flexible and adaptive attentional control ability are important characteristics of human intelligence.

The SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect (i.e., a tendency to associate small/large magnitude numbers with the left/right hand side) is prevalent across the whole lifespan. Because the ability to relate numbers to space has been viewed as a cornerstone in the development of mathematical skills, the relationship between the SNARC effect and math skills has been frequently examined. The results remain largely inconsistent. Studies testing groups of people with very low or very high skill levels in math sometimes found relationships between SNARC and math skills. So far, however, studies testing such extreme math skills level groups were mostly investigating the SNARC effect in individuals revealing math difficulties. Groups with above average math skills remain understudied, especially in regard to children. Here, we investigate the SNARC effect in gifted children, as compared to normally developing children (overall n = 165). Frequentist and Bayesian analysis suggested that the groups did not differ from each other in the SNARC effect. These results are the first to provide evidence for the SNARC effect in a relatively large sample of gifted (and mathematically highly skilled) children. In sum, our study provides another piece of evidence for no direct link between the SNARC effect and mathematical ability in childhood. The SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect (i.e., a tendency to associate small/large magnitude numbers with the left/right hand side) is prevalent across the whole lifespan. Because the ability to relate numbers to space has been viewed as a cornerstone in the development of mathematical skills, the relationship between the SNARC effect and math skills has been frequently examined. The results remain largely inconsistent. Studies testing groups of people with very low or very high skill levels in math sometimes found relationships between SNARC and math skills. So far, however, studies testing such extreme math skills level groups were mostly investigating the SNARC effect in individuals revealing math difficulties. Groups with above average math skills remain understudied, especially in regard to children. Here, we investigate the SNARC effect in gifted children, as compared to normally developing children (overall n = 165). Frequentist and Bayesian analysis suggested that the groups did not differ from each other in the SNARC effect. These results are the first to provide evidence for the SNARC effect in a relatively large sample of gifted (and mathematically highly skilled) children. In sum, our study provides another piece of evidence for no direct link between the SNARC effect and mathematical ability in childhood.

Research has demonstrated that implicit theories of creativity are crucial in shaping an individual’s behavior and real-life decisions toward being creative. The present study proposed and examined the underlying mechanisms of how two kinds of implicit theories—the growth mindset of the creative self and the stereotype of creative others—are associated with creative achievements through the mediating role of creativity motivation. Participants were 606 undergraduate students who were enrolled in an education major in two universities in China. Overall, the study found that Chinese students held a positive image toward a creative student, regarding him or her as highly competent, warm, and popular. Student perceptions of a creative other were positively related to their growth mindset of creativity. Moreover, results verified both the mediating role of creativity motivation on growth mindset, as well as the effect of positive stereotyping of the creative other on students’ creative achievement. These findings point to promising creativity motivation strategies including the cultivation of a malleable view of creativity and of creative role models, that may, in turn, promote creative achievement by encouraging students to do, learn, and accomplish new things.

To clarify the effects of individual differences in fluid intelligence (Gf) on attentional resource allocation, the present study proposes a new hypothesis (i.e., the integrated control hypothesis) based on previous studies and provides preliminary empirical evidence through a pupillometry study. The results showed that both task type and task difficulty play crucial roles in the relationship between Gf and attentional resource allocation when participants perform visuospatial-domain tasks. In particular, in the exploitation task, higher Gf individuals allocated fewer attentional resources than those with average Gf at all the difficulty levels. In contrast, in the exploration task, those with higher intelligence allocated equivalent resources in the low- and medium-difficulty trials and more resources in the high-difficulty trials; this phenomenon was more significant among the male subjects. In conclusion, this study suggests that high Gf individuals tend to control their attention state in tasks with diverse demands, allowing them to dynamically optimize the use of attentional resources and flexibly adapt to changing conditions.

Children are found to exhibit high degrees of delay discounting compared with adults in many delay discounting studies. However, the temporal dynamics of the differences behind the behaviors are not well known. In this study, we chose two age groups of participants and adopted event-related potential (ERP) techniques to investigate the neural dynamic differences between children and adults during delay discounting processes. Behavioral findings showed that children discounted more than adults and chose more immediate choices. Electrophysiological findings revealed that children exhibited longer neural processing (longer P2 latency) than adults during the early detection and identification phase. Children showed less cognitive control (smaller N2 amplitude) than adults over the middle frontal areas, and they devoted more neural effort (larger P3 amplitudes) to making final choices than adults. The factors of reward amount and time delay could influence the development of delay discounting in male children.

Although the theory of the socio‐cultural approach to creativity is gaining steam, empirical studies with advanced statistical tools are lagging behind. To address the gap of empirical studies integrating individual, social environmental, and cultural factors, we examined how motivational factors and environmental responsiveness were jointly related to college students’ creative achievement in different nations. Participants were university students from eight culturally and geographically diverse regions: Argentina, Austria, Chile, China, Kosovo, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Overall, the results painted a generally positive picture of the relationship between environmental responsiveness, motivational factors, and creative achievement. By employing structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple‐group SEM (MGSEM) methods, results partially supported the mediation role of motivational factors between environmental responsiveness and creative achievement. In addition, we observed more consistent relationships between parental responsiveness and motivational factors or creative achievement, than lecturer. This held in common across all seven countries which fulfilled the requirements for the SEM process, indicating that parents play a potential vital role in supporting students’ motivational aspects and creative achievements, whereas lecturers supporting role is relative to the cultural organizational circumstances. As the first large‐scale empirical study with a socio‐cultural approach, we invited further discussion and proposed future cross‐cultural research of this kind. Research implications and practical suggestions were addressed.

This study investigated the inhibitory process of collaborative inhibition. An emotional Stroop task was manipulated three times after a group-recall task across three experiments. The results showed that, when participants performed an emotional Stroop task immediately after a group-recall task (Experiment 1) or between two subsequent individual-recall tasks after a group-recall task (Experiment 3), they were able to discriminate color information relating to studied but nonrecalled emotional stimuli more rapidly in the collaborative-recall condition than in the nominal-recall condition. This indicated that participants experienced a stronger inhibition effect in the former condition. However, when the emotional Stroop task was performed after the final individual-recall task (Experiment 2), there were no differences in discrimination between the conditions. These results suggest that the inhibition effect occurs immediately after the group-recall phase and lasts until the final individual-recall task is completed (4 minutes or longer in Experiment 3). It is therefore possible to discuss retrieval inhibition as an underlying mechanism of collaborative inhibition.

The education of gifted children is of considerable interest.The present study focused on the effect of enriched education on intellectually gifted children's attention. In the present study, 7-12-year-old children completed seven tests of attention (alertness, focused attention, divided attention, attentional switching, sustained attention, spatial attention, and supervisory attention) to investigate the differences among intellectually gifted children under different educational environments. The results showed that intellectually gifted children who received enriched education had better attentional performance than did intellectually gifted children who received standard education. The result affords theoretical support for gifted-education practice.

Previous researches have shown that people with higher fluid intelligence are more likely to detect the unexpected stimuli. The current study systematically explored the relationship between fluid intelligence and sustained inattentional blindness in children. In Experiment 1, we measured one hundred and seventy-nine 7-to-14-year-old children's fluid intelligence and sustained inattentional blindness. The results showed that fluid intelligence was negatively related to sustained inattentional blindness only in 7-to-8-year-old children. In Experiment 2, we explored sustained inattentional blindness in sixty children with high Raven's scores. We found that compared with children who have average Raven's scores aged 11-to-12 years old, children with high Raven's scores were unable to better avoid sustained inattentional blindness. In general, this research implies that the relation between fluid intelligence and sustained inattentional blindness is weak. Fluid intelligence could predict sustained inattentional blindness only when children do not have enough perceptual capacities to complete the primary task.

The current study investigated monetary and social reward processing in children, adolescents and adults with adapted incentive-delay tasks and self-report questionnaires. Both tasks had three levels of reward magnitudes (no, low, and high). Qualified participants received 15 Chinese Yuan and an honor certificate as monetary and social rewards, respectively. The results indicated that both monetary and social rewards effectively speeded up responses for all three age groups as reward magnitude increased in the choice reaction time task. Among adolescents and adults, males exhibited faster responses in high reward than in low reward condition, while females responded equally fast in both conditions. Among children, girls responded faster to high reward than low reward condition. However, boys committed more errors than girls in low and high reward conditions, and they had exhibited more errors in high reward than that in no reward condition for social reward. Regarding the subjective ratings, both children and adolescents reported higher motivation for social reward than for monetary reward. These findings indicated that the males in the adolescent and adult groups were more sensitive to reward than were the females. Moreover, tangible and quantitative social reward had stronger incentive power than monetary reward among children and adolescents.

The authors examined sustained attention performance and PTSD symptoms in a sample of 281 orphans and non-orphans who experienced the Sichuan Earthquake in China. They hypothesized that the orphans had a higher possibility to risk for PTSD than non-orphans, and the former also might even tend to be more impulsive, allergic which might affect their basic cognitive skill-attention. The findings showed evidence of cognitive developmental stages, from vigilance to numbness and avoidance, in the continuous performance test (CPT) task by including pre-earthquake orphans. The post-earthquake orphans were still in a high level of vigilance and performed well in the CPT task when compared with the pre-earthquake orphans. The non-orphans with high possibility to risk for PTSD were the most concentrated and least impulsive. Given the potentially mutual relationship between sustained attention and posttraumatic stress disorder, careful consideration must be given to the treatment of traumatized children who present with PTSD symptoms. In accordance with practice guidelines, a duplex informant, duplex measure approach in the decision of educational plans for these children is strongly recommended.

Tonic pupil size and its variability are sensitive to cognitive abilities (such as fluid intelligence [Gf]) among individuals. The present study aimed to examine this relationship in a new sample set (i.e., adolescents aged 11-14 years) with several important factors considered. We conducted two task-free tasks (the blank-screen viewing task and the scene viewing task) to measure tonic pupil size and its variability in 11-14-year-old adolescents with different Gf levels and preliminarily tested the role of task type and stimuli's luminance on this relationship. The results found that high-Gf adolescents showed smaller tonic pupil size in both tasks but showed larger variability of tonic pupil size in the blank-screen viewing task. Task type and stimuli's luminance could influence tonic pupil size and its variability in different ways. Cognitive and underlying neural mechanisms of these results are discussed to provide an explanation and suggestions for future studies.

The SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect (i.e., a tendency to associate small / large magnitude numbers with the left / right hand side), is prevalent across the whole lifespan. Because the ability to relate numbers to space has been viewed as a cornerstone in the development of mathematical skills, the relationship between the SNARC effect and math skill has been frequently examined. The results remain largely inconsistent. Studies testing groups of people with very low or very high skill levels in math sometimes found relationships between SNARC and math skill. So far, however, studies testing such extreme math skill level groups were mostly investigating the SNARC effect in individuals revealing math difficulties. Groups with above average math skills remain understudied, especially in regard to children. Here, we investigate the SNARC effect in gifted children, as compared to normally developing children (overall n = 165). Frequentist and Bayesian analysis suggested that the groups did not differ from each other in the SNARC effect. These results are the first to provide evidence for the SNARC effect in a relatively large sample of gifted (and mathematically highly skilled) children. In sum, our study provides another piece of evidence for no direct link between the SNARC effect and mathematical ability in childhood.

The term “intellectually gifted rural-to-urban migrant children” refers to intellectually gifted children who are in migration from rural to urban areas. We compared performances on seven attention tasks among intellectually gifted (n = 26) and average (n = 30) rural-to-urban migrant and intellectually gifted urban children (n = 31). Our results showed that intellectually gifted rural-to-urban migrant children performed more correctly and faster on some attention tasks than did the intellectually average rural-to-urban migrant children, but they did not perform as well on some attention tasks as did the intellectually gifted urban children. Based on the attentional structures, it was evident the intellectually gifted rural-to-urban migrant children developed more mature than did either the intellectually gifted urban or the intellectually average rural-to-urban migrant children. This suggests the intellectually gifted rural-to-urban migrant children’s attention is overall superior to that of their...

The relationship between recognition memory and cognitive control is an important research topic. The current study investigated how conflict control influences an individual's emotional memory. During the encoding phase, participants were required to judge the affective valence of a Chinese Chengyu word (either positive or negative) in a modified Simon paradigm and to remember the word. Half of the words were presented in the congruent condition and the other half were displayed in the incongruent condition. During the retrieval phase, participants were instructed to make an 'old/new judgment' and decide whether the word had been presented previously. Electrophysiological responses were recorded using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. The behavioral results of retrieval processes showed that participants remembered more positive than negative words when they were encoded in the congruent condition. The electrophysiological results revealed that the retrieval of words encoded in the incongruent condition elicited less negative frontal negativity (FN) and early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitudes than those encoded in the congruent condition. The retrieval of words encoded in the incongruent condition induced greater late positive complex (LPC) amplitudes, relative to those encoded in the congruent condition on the left hemisphere. It was also observed that the recognition of positive words induced faster LPC responses than negative words when they were encoded in the incongruent condition. The present electrophysiological study illustrates that emotional memory processes may be affected by conflict control. (C) 2015 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.