Previous studies tend to focus on two facets of creativity: everyday creativity (little-C) and actual creative achievement (Big-C). While little-C and Big-C both involve divergent thinking (DT), the role of DT in their relationship remains unclear. Here, we assessed the creativity scores of 64 adults, including the Creative Behavior Inventory…

Prior work suggests that differences in brain morphology and task-evoked neural activity may underlie extraordinary creative achievement. Here, we extend these findings by focusing on resting blood oxygen level-dependent (rsBOLD) functional connectivity differences between eminent creators from diverse fields of expertise and a "smart"…

This study used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of supernatural fiction, featuring either fictional or realistic characters, compared to real-world stories. Participants' brain activations were recorded while they read supernatural/realistic scenarios. Results showed that…

The consolidation process stabilizes a new initially labile memory. This consolidation could operate on a shorter timescale during wakefulness after initial motor learning. Within micro-offline learning states, sequences of simple individual actions learned through interleaved practice are condensed into a unified skill through a time-dependent…

Children are biologically predisposed to develop language, but learning to read requires years of instruction on the associations and conventions inherent to culturally specific writing systems. This does not come easily to all students. Dyslexia is a specific type of reading disability that impacts millions of learners in the K-12 school system.…

Gestures accent and illustrate our communication. Although previous studies have uncovered the positive effects of gestures on communication, little is known about the specific cognitive functions of different types of gestures, or the instantaneous multi-brain dynamics. Here we used the fNIRS-based hyperscanning technique to track the brain…

Evidence implicating theta rhythms in declarative memory encoding and retrieval, together with the notion that both retrieval and consolidation involve memory reinstatement or replay, suggests that post-learning theta rhythm modulation can promote early consolidation of newly formed memories. Building on earlier work employing theta neurofeedback,…

The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential reflecting affective processing, may exhibit developmental shifts in magnitude and scalp location. In the present longitudinal study, 501 youth (47.3% female; 89.4% White; 12.0% Hispanic) completed the emotion interrupt task to elicit the LPP to neutral, positive, and negative images at…

Cognitive control shows two main developmental trends: greater self-directedness (i.e., children need less external scaffolding) and greater proactiveness (i.e., children increasingly anticipate and prepare for upcoming cognitive demands). The present study examined potential links between these major developmental transitions. Specifically, it…

Visual attention develops rapidly across the first postnatal year, from reflexive eye movements driven by low-level stimulus properties to increasingly voluntary eye movements influenced by higher-order factors. To test the hypothesis that development reflects guidance by increasingly abstract features, we used representational similarity analysis…

There are large individual differences in arithmetic skills. Although a number of brain-wide association studies have attempted to identify the neural correlates of these individual differences, studies have focused on relatively small sample sizes and have yielded inconsistent results. In the current voxel-based morphometry study, we merged six…

The study aimed to investigate the relationship between students' prevailing brain dominance pattern and their level of creative thinking in science. The study sample consisted of 850 ninth-grade students in Jordan selected by the cluster random method. The brain control scale and the test of creative thinking in science were used to collect data.…

Aperiodic electroencephalography (EEG) activity is hypothesized to index biological mechanisms that underpin brain functioning. This longitudinal study characterized the developmental trajectories of the aperiodic slope (i.e., aperiodic exponent) and offset from infancy to 7 years of age in a US community sample (N = 391, 46.5% female,…

Most jazz music contains some form of improvisation. Therefore, teaching improvisation, or spontaneous musical composition within a given context, remains an important task in music education. Discovering the neural processes involved in jazz improvisation might aid music educators who teach jazz improvisation and give researchers greater insight…

Difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep is common among autistic individuals and co-occurs with internalizing and externalizing symptoms. This study tested associations between subcortical regions implicated in sleep processes and measures of dysregulated sleep initiation/maintenance in autistic and non-autistic 2- to 4-year-olds. The role of…