In an agent-based simulation, we investigate the implications of social interaction and cognitive diversity on creative processes of divergent thinking. Agents performed a verbal association task individually and jointly in pairs. We created pairs of varying cognitive diversity by manipulating properties of the vector spaces defining their semantic memory. We find that cognitive diversity positively stimulates the flexibility of agents’ collective cognitive search, giving rise to higher fluency (more solutions) and originality (more ‘rare’ solutions). While cognitively similar agents tend to exploit local semantic neighborhoods, diversity promotes more explorative search, with longer distances traveled in semantic space. This helps diverse pairs reach more distant areas of semantic space and escape cognitive fixation. However, our model also suggests that too high levels of diversity can have detrimental effects, as overly exploratory behaviors make pairs leave solution saturated areas prematurely and increase the risk of reaching semantic “dead ends”.

In this study we investigate semantic retrieval strategies in order to inform discussions about cognitive mechanisms underlying divergent thinking and creativity. Relying on a verbal fluency task, we map the particular associative strategies participants engage and how they predict their performance. The study starts from the assumption that during divergent thinking processes, participants move along a path through a semantic space, and that each step is prompted by an associative strategy taking them from one word to the next. There are, however, a number of such strategies, and we predict that the outcome of the process is contingent on participants’ engagement of and shift between strategies. The study consists of a two-part elicitation paradigm where participants first conduct a verbal fluency task and then are guided through a meta-cognitive retrieval process to individuate the strategies employed in the task. We report significant correlations between the engagement of associative strategies and outcome measures of divergent thinking in terms of originality, flexibility and fluency.

In an experimental study, we investigated how social interaction dynamics affect collective creativity. Pairs of participants collaborated in a computer game, creating “beautiful and interesting” shapes by moving tiles on a large touchscreen. We identified naturally emerging interaction styles by applying k-means clustering on participants’ tile moves. The game allowed us to quantify the unfolding creative process in a well-defined search space. Pairs characterized by a single dominating member tended to visit fewer areas of the solution space, stay there longer and created on average more (but less original) shapes. In contrast, pairs that took turns with every tile move tended to explore more, stayed in each area of the solution space for less time and created fewer (but more original) shapes. While previous literature found conflicting effects of ‘creating with another’, the current paper suggests naturally emerging interaction styles as a differentiating factor underlying how collective creativity unfolds.

Spatial demonstratives, i.e. words like this and that, serve asimportant tools to establish joint attention, allowinginterlocutors to flexibly share spatial reference schemes.However, little experimental work has investigated whichperceptual and social factors drive speakers’ choices ofdemonstrative forms. We used a novel experimental paradigmto explore 1) the role of relative placement of competingreferents on the sagittal and lateral planes, 2) whether and howthe presence of an addressee modulates the speaker’s choice ofdemonstrative forms. We found that the choice ofdemonstratives is affected by the relative position ofcompeting referents both on the sagittal and lateral plane.Furthermore, we found that the presence of an interlocutorshifts attraction for proximal demonstratives towards theshared space of reference, but only in collaborative contexts.Together, these results suggest that spatial deixis is groundedin a contrastive organization of space tightly coupled to manualand social affordances.

Groups of interacting individuals are often found to have an advantage over individuals in contexts of complex problem solving. We suggest that social interaction allows group members to share diverse introspections, perspectives and strategies, promoting the formation of more abstract problem representations, which – in turn – apply more flexibly to new problem contexts. In a reinforcement learning task inspired by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), participants categorized aliens as friendly or dangerous based on an underlying rule specifying feature combinations. After a number of correctly categorized trials, the rule would change (without explicit notification). Participants could solve the task by learning every new rule, but could also discover an underlying abstract rule, which would facilitate faster recovery from local rule changes. We compared pairs of participants individually trained on different rules (diversity pairs), with pairs trained on the same rule (non-diversity pairs), and individuals. We found that diversity pairs outperformed non- diverse pairs and individuals. Our findings suggest that diversity in prior experience benefits groups, likely due to processes of abstraction and cognitive flexibility.

The European Upper Palaeolithic is rich in figurative cave art. In particular, prey animals are often depicted in simple sche- matic outlines. The role and function of these depictions is sub- ject of controversy with competing accounts represented in the literature. Here we apply eye-tracking to investigate partici- pants' distribution of visual attention as a function of three hy- pothesized pragmatic functions of the cave art: aesthetic appre- ciation, narratives about animal behavior, and social learning of animal species. Results indicate vast variability in visual ex- ploration patterns across the viewing conditions, with more uniformly distributed attention in the aesthetics condition, more focus on legs and torso in the behavior condition, and more attention to the head regions in the species recognition condition. Findings are discussed in regards to the under- and over-specification of information in the animal paintings as a cue to their possible past function.

In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that constitutive properties of social interaction - such as diversityin cognitive styles, knowledge and experience - enhance cognitive processes of abstraction. Through three sessions, individualsand dyads categorized aliens based on combinations of features such as the shape and color of their body parts. We manipulatedrelations among the features to elicit increasingly complex categories. Furthermore, to assess the character of participants’evolving categories, after each training session they were presented to a new test set of aliens that differed in appearance, butshared relations among features with aliens from the training set. We found that dyads outcompete individuals in categorizationaccuracy across levels of complexity. We also found that this effect is due to the more abstract and rule-based character ofdyads emerging representations as evidenced by their performance on test items.

Symbolic artifacts present a challenge to theories of neurocognitive processing due to their dual nature: they are both physical objects and vehicles of social meanings. While their physical properties can be read of the surface structure, the meaning of symbolic artifacts depends on their embeddedness in cultural practices. In this study, participants built models of LEGO bricks to illustrate their understanding of abstract concepts. Subsequently, they were scanned with fMRI while presented to photographs of their own and others’ models. When participants attended to the meaning of the models, we observed activations associated with social cognition and semantics. In contrast, when attending to the physical properties, we observed activations related to object recognition and manipulation. Furthermore, when contrasting own and others’ models, we found activations in areas associated with autobiographical memory and agency. Our findings support a view of symbolic artifacts as neurocognitive trails of human social interactions.

Interpersonal physiological entrainment is increasingly argued to underlie rapport, empathy and even team performance. We investigate the presence, temporal development, possible mechanisms and impact of interpersonal heart rate entrainment during collective creative LEGO construction tasks. We observe a statistically significant presence and increase over time of structured entrainment, which relates to the actual unfolding and development of behavioral coordination. Heart rate entrainment does not predict rapport and perceived group competence, but behavioral coordination does. Physiological entrainment, thus, should not be considered a universal unmediated proxy for shared emotions, empathy and collective performance. Behavioral coordination – at least in tasks requiring forms of joint action – seems to be a more informative proxy for both physiological entrainment and collective experience.

Understanding the unique evolutionary trajectory taken by humanity is impossible without an appreciation of our singular capacities for symbolic cognition and behaviour, which have evolved into the diverse practices of communication, art, reasoning, and ritual we encounter today (Deacon, 1998; Donald, 1991). But how did these capacities evolve during the Late Pleistocene?