How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal-oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes -- thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC) has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge,…

When people are working on creative tasks, they make progress in conscious thought (CT) and unconscious thought (UT) processes. UT occurs outside conscious awareness, and unlike CT, it is independent of working memory resources. Previous studies suggest UT is more influential under certain conditions, known as the UT effect. Typically, these…

Previous research has examined cross-cultural influences on creative performance. Findings of this line of inquiry are, however, not consistent. While some scholars suggest that individuals from Western cultures, who tend to apply context-independent thinking styles, produce more novel ideas given a cognitive task than individuals from Eastern…

Multitasking abilities are vital for conducting flight missions. Traditional theories of multitasking suggest that cognitive resources represent a determining factor of said performance. The current study takes a different approach by investigating how the stability-flexibility-dilemma of cognitive control influences multitasking performance in a…

It is well established that performing multiple tasks simultaneously (dual-tasking) or sequentially (task-switching) degrades performance on one or both tasks. However, it is unknown whether task-switching adds to the effects of dual-tasking in a single setup. We investigated this in a simulated everyday-like car driving scenario. We expected an…

While people approach creative actions in diverse ways, navigating them effectively requires self-regulatory effort. In this preregistered experiment, we examined whether simple self-regulation prompts, provided across the stages of the creative process, make the outcomes more creative. Participants (N = 332) engaged in one of three creativity…

Problem posing is a promising teaching method for enhancing motivation and performance in mathematics and more specifically in mathematical modelling. Hence, the goals of our study were twofold: (1) to examine the effects of problem posing on modelling performance, self-efficacy, and task values in solving modelling problems, and (2) to analyze…

In two experiments, we examine how features of an imperfect automated decision aid influence compliance with the aid in a simplified, simulated nautical collision avoidance task. Experiment 1 examined the impact of providing transparency in the pre-task instructions regarding which attributes of the task that the aid uses to provide its…

Background: University students need to self-regulate but are sometimes incapable of doing so. Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) can support students' appraisal of study behaviour, from which goals can be set and performed. However, it is unclear how goal-setting and self-motivation within self-regulated learning elicits behaviour when using an…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

In this exploratory study, we designed and validated game-based performance tasks to assess the development of representational flexibility in autistic adolescents through virtual reality (VR)-based training. Representational flexibility, a critical cognitive ability, involves attention switching, generating representations, and recognizing…

Purpose: Pitch perception is important for speech sound learning, and reading acquisition requires integration of speech sounds and written letters. Many individuals with dyslexia exhibit auditory perception deficits that may therefore contribute to their reading impairment given that complex pitch perception is crucial for categorizing speech…