Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research,…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a word association retrieval task that consists of a series of problems, each with three seemingly unrelated prompt words. The subject is asked to produce a single word that is related to all three prompt words. In this paper, we provide support for a theory in which the RAT assesses a person's ability to…

The compound Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a classic measure of creativity. Participants are shown three cue words (sore-shoulder-sweat) and asked to generate a word that connects them (cold). Theoretical views of RAT performance differ in the degree to which they conceptualize performance as depending on automatic spreading activation across…

The Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962; Mednick & Mednick, 1967) is a commonly employed test of creative convergent thinking. The RAT is scored with a dichotomous scoring, scoring correct answers as 1 and all other answers as 0. Based on recent research into the information processing underlying RAT performance, we argued that the…

The effect of napping versus wakefulness was studied on primed and repeated Remote Associate Tests (RATs) and on divergent creativity tests. The participants were 42 students from the USA, studying international courses at a Swedish university. The hypotheses for the RATs were (1), when the correct answers were primed before the nap, the RAT…

Studies in embodied cognition show that physical sensations, such as touch and movement, influence cognitive processes. Two studies were conducted to test whether squeezing a soft versus a hard ball facilitates different types of creativity. Squeezing a malleable ball would increase divergent creativity by catalyzing multiple or alternative ideas,…

Recent evidence suggests that solving problems through insight can enhance long-term memory for the problem and its solution. Previous findings have shown that generation of the solution as well as experiencing a feeling of Aha! can have a beneficial relationship to later memory. These findings lead to the question of how learning in…

Investigation of the interaction of mental states and cognitive processes in the classroom allows us to solve the problem of increasing the effectiveness of training by activating cognitive processes and management of students' mental states. This article is concerned with the most general patterns of interaction between mental state and…

Modafinil is a drug licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy and sleep apnea. Recently, modafinil has been reported to be used as a pharmacological cognitive enhancer by healthy individuals with no psychiatric disorders. This paper reports on a study that investigated the effects of modafinil on divergent and convergent thinking tasks of…

Previous studies found that performance on the remote associates test (RAT) improves after a period of incubation and that increased alpha brain waves over the right posterior brain predict the emergence of RAT insight solutions. We report an experiment that tested whether increased alpha brain waves during incubation improve RAT performance.…

Incubation has long been proposed as a mechanism in creative problem solving (Wallas, 1926). A new trial-by-trial method for observing incubation effects was used to compare the forgetting fixation hypothesis with the conscious work hypothesis. Two experiments examined the effects of incubation on initially unsolved Remote Associates Test (RAT)…

A central question in creativity concerns how insightful ideas emerge. Anecdotal examples of insightful scientific and technical discoveries include Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization of rubber, and Mendeleev's realization that there may be gaps as he tried to arrange the elements into the Periodic Table. Although most people would regard…