UK Creativity Researchers’ Annual Conference:
university of buckingham, 26th June 2024.
Bridging Worlds: Creativity Research at the Intersection of Psychology and Profession
Newnote/KEynote Presentations
Creating Research through Practice: Explorations at the intersection of identity
In this newnote presentation, Beth will offer personal reflections on how her research is informed, enhanced, and challenged by the convergence of ‘researcher’ with her other professional identities: as a coaching psychologist and artist.
With considerations of what’s possible at the intersection of practice and research, this talk will first and foremost invite reflection on the role of identity in shaping our individual and collective pursuit of knowledge and innovation, before examining the role of practice and identity in the development of research questions, methods, and outcomes. Beth will position the relationship between research and impact as cyclical and interdependent – an opportunity to consider how we might collectively build a more sustainable and collaborative integration of research and practice.
As well as exploring what’s possible, Beth will also discuss some of the ethical challenges and responsibilities faced by those working at the intersection of practice and research, using real-world examples from her experience as a researcher at the forefront of an unregulated and diverse field of professional practice.
Beyond Boundaries: Environmental Impacts on Creative Cognition in Virtual Reality.
In this keynote presentation, Iyad Sawaftah will unveil the preliminary results of his research on the impact of various virtual environments on cognitive flexibility and creativity. This study explores how different settings—such as an office, café, nature scene, and laboratory—affect verbal fluency and divergent thinking, as well as people’s encoding and preference for each environment and their subjective estimates of performance.
Iyad will address a significant gap in previous studies by providing direct comparisons between different environmental settings and identifying specific environmental features that influence cognitive performance. He will discuss the key methodology used in his research, particularly the use of Virtual Reality (VR) as a tool. He will explain the significance of VR in obtaining precise data about creativity, its ability to meticulously control and measure various environmental variables, and how it creates immersive environments that simulate real-world conditions. This approach enables a detailed examination of environmental influences on cognitive processes.
How designers build an understanding of a problem in co-evolution and the implications for solution quality
The process of information gathering is central to how design problems are solved. Designers’ decisions on how much information to gather can affect their understanding of a problem, and the development of solutions. Designers’ feelings of certainty and uncertainty inform these decisions, affecting the depth of consideration of the problem and solution. However, feelings of certainty can be associated with decisions of any quality. It is unclear how designers develop their understanding of a problem, and whether such understanding differs from the actual understanding needed for a satisfactory resolution. Drawing on cognitive theory and data from ethnographic case studies, this study explores how designers solve problems. The findings show that problems can be understood at different levels of depth and at each level an individual can experience certainty. Consequently, there can be a disparity between designers’ level of understanding and what actually is required for a satisfactory response. Components which affect designers’ certainty-threshold are identified. These components determine whether the designer will feel certain, uncertain, or on the threshold when exploring a problem, thus influencing their subsequent actions. Key actors’ feedback can influence the certainty-threshold. Negative feedback may prompt further exploration, while positive feedback may validate the solution.
Oral Presentations
Prof. Paul Sowden
Development and impacts of a Creativity Collaborative of schools teaching for creativity
Funded by Arts Council England, we have developed a three-year programme of work, involving a network of primary schools, to foster learners’ creativity across the school curriculum. The programme comprises five interleaved streams of work: Context, Knowledge, Agency, Pedagogies and Leadership for creativity. Context for creativity focuses on identifying barriers and enablers of teaching for creativity in our participating schools. Knowledge for creativity focuses on building learners’, teachers’ and leaders’ metacognitive knowledge of creativity. Agency for creativity focuses on supporting learners and teachers to develop their creative self-efficacy. Pedagogies for creativity focuses on developing evidence-based pedagogies to foster creativity, working with teachers, and pre-service teachers undergoing initial teacher education. Finally, leadership for creativity focuses on effective leadership, governance and collaboration strategies to grow a climate for creativity and sustainable change. To assess impact of the work streams, we have used a mixed-methods approach comprising quantitative measures (creative self-efficacy, metacognitive knowledge of creativity, confidence and efficacy to teach for creativity, mental well-being, school satisfaction), focus groups, interviews and teacher observation of creative outcomes in the classroom. To date, the quantitative measures have been completed twice, one year apart (time 1: n pupils = 1662, n teachers = 85. time 2: n pupils = 1815, n teachers = 123), allowing us to compare outcomes for schools and classes that were part of our initial intervention group with those that were not, over time. I will describe the evolution of our Creativity Collaborative, challenges during development and some impacts to date.
Dr Kathryn Friedlander
From Expertise to Creativity: Understanding Elite Performance in Complex Domains
We still have some way to go to understand how we might best select, support or train creative experts. Properly grounded research into expertise could shed important light on this, explaining how we might successfully acquire knowledge, hone our creative skills and tailor our careers to individual skill-sets. Yet the study of expertise is often seen as antithetical to that of creativity, with expertise conceptualised as the mundane and methodological execution of reliable, skilful, but not remarkable, performance. This talk argues for the need to synthesize the creativity and expertise literature, capitalizing on recent multi-factorial conceptualizations of talent. Parallels between key models of creativity (for example, the 4Cs approach; Confluence theory) and models of skill development (for example Hoffman’s levels of expertise; Multifactorial Gene-Environment Interaction Model) are argued to show striking similarities. The talk concludes by arguing for the need to explore inter- and intra-personal drivers of performance, and the wider roles of imagination, creativity, and opportunity in creative fields of expertise. Neglected fields of creative performance, including art, creative writing, theatre, dance, and STEM, alongside mind games other than chess, are prime candidates for deeper exploration.
Dr Kevin Byron
Creativity, Uncommon Sense and Threshold Concepts
Big creative ideas that leave a mark in history (Kaufmann and Beghetto’s ‘Big C’ (1)), are not initially common sense to anyone except their originators. The time taken for them to become widely accepted is determined partly by the degree to which they challenge the status quo. Impressionism is an example of this in the world of fine art during the 19th century, and in science the introduction of quantum theory in the early 20th century. Interestingly, this inertia in accepting original ideas developed by others, is also present in the individual at the lower levels of creativity (ie ‘mini-c’ and ‘little-c’ creativity). These ideas were described by Land et al (2) as ‘Threshold Concepts’. Learning is a discontinuous process of delays, insights (gained through a combination of critical and creative thinking) and set-backs as our understanding develops. However there are concepts in many disciplines that are counter-intuitive and challenge common sense, and these require a great deal more creative thought in order to accept them. This paper will re-visit the ideas of threshold concepts in the context of creativity and describe strategies for enabling a smoother transition in trying to understanding them. (1) Kaufmann, J.C., and Beghetto, R.A. (2009), The 4C Model of Creativity; Review of General Psychology 2009, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1-12. (2) Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F. and Davies, P. (2005), Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: implications for course design and evaluation, in C. Rust (ed.), Improving Student Learning – equality and diversity, Oxford: OCSLD.
Ms. Youna Park and Dr Teemu Toivainen
How far I can think – The Utility of Semantic Distance in the Development of the Remote Associates Test
The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a measure of creative cognition, tapping into the ability of making conceptual associations. The most common version of the task is the compound RAT (cRAT). Due to the rationale of the task, the cRAT is dependent on linguistic abilities and provides an advantage for native speakers. Alternative for the cRAT is to ask participants to associate concepts based on sematic relationships (functional RAT; fRAT). In the fRAT tasks, the stimuli can be presented either with words or with images (visual RAT; vRAT). This study utilises the concept of semantic distance in the creation of items for the fRAT in both linguistic and visual forms. This provides a new metric to assess the performance in the RAT tasks. We found that semantic distance scores were associated with linguistic and visual RAT test scores. In addition, the linguistic and visual task performance was positively correlated (r = 0.53). We also replicated the finding of native English speakers outperforming the non-native English speakers. Openness and Intellect were not predicting performance in any RAT task.The results successfully demonstrated the utility of semantic distance in the development of the RAT and indicated that both linguistic and visual forms of fRAT can measure the same underlying ability – creative potential.
Further Information
For further information about our conference, including the location and registration, please visit out main 2024 conference page by clicking here.
Any queries? Contact us: ukcreativityresearchers@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @ukcreativity.
UK Creativity Researchers was founded by Dr Lindsey Carruthers at Edinburgh Napier University, Dr Gill Hill at University of Buckingham, and Dr Shelly Kemp at King’s College London.
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