Although it is increasingly recognized that evaluation is a key phase for a two-fold creativity model, the neural model is not yet well understood. To this end, we constructed a theoretical model of ...creative evaluation and supported it with neural evidence through event-related potentials (ERPs) technology during a creative advertising task. Participants were required to evaluate the relationship between target words and advertising that systematically varied in novelty and usefulness. The ERPs results showed that (a) the novelty-usefulness and novelty-only conditions evoked a larger N1-P2 amplitude, reflecting an automatic attentional bias to novelty, and (b) these two novelty conditions elicited a larger N200-500 amplitude, reflecting an effort to process the novel content; (c) the novelty-usefulness and usefulness-only conditions induced a larger LPC amplitude, reflecting that valuable associations were formed through retrieval of relevant memories. These results propose a neural model of creative evaluation in advertising: the N1-P2, N200-500, and LPC should be the key indices to define three sub-processes of novelty perception, conception expansion, and value selection, respectively.
With the advancement of technology and diversification of payment methods, mobile payment methods have gradually replaced traditional cash payments and become the mainstream payment mode. Although ...mobile payment is more convenient, is it faster than cash payment when their physical differences are controlled? Does it affect consumer behavior? We designed two studies to explore these questions. In Study 1, we required 192 participants to physically pay by cash or mobile phone and measured their willingness to pay (WTP). In Study 2, we compared the speed of the two payment methods when the physical differences between them were eliminated and measured consumers' willingness to buy from 46 students. Our results indicated that the effect of mobile payment, which increases WTP, also applies to specific products, and it does not occur if the money is a gift, as opposed to if it is earned. Moreover, when the process of cash payment is made as easy as mobile payment, people still spend less time on mobile payments than cash payment, and mobile payment effect is impacted by payment time. The above results supplement the evidence that payment methods have an impact on consumer behavior, and provide consumers, merchants, and regional managers with suggestions on payment methods.
Chunk decomposition plays an important role in cognitive flexibility in particular with regards to representational change, which is critical for insight problem solving and creative thinking. In ...this study, we investigated the cognitive mechanism of decomposing Chinese character chunks through a parametric fMRI design. Our results from this parametric manipulation revealed widely distributed activations in frontal, parietal, and occipital cortex and negative activations in parietal and visual areas in response to chunk tightness during decomposition. To mentally manipulate the element of a given old chunk, superior parietal lobe appears to support element restructuring in a goal-directed way, whereas the negatively activated inferior parietal lobe may support preventing irrelevant objects from being attended. Moreover, determining alternative ways of restructuring requires a constellation of frontal areas in the cognitive control network, such as the right lateral prefrontal cortex in inhibiting the predominant chunk representations, the presupplementary motor area in initiating a transition of mental task set, and the inferior frontal junction in establishing task sets. In conclusion, this suggests that chunk decomposition reflects mental transformation of problem representation from an inappropriate state to a new one alongside with an evaluation of novel and insightful solutions by the caudate in the dorsal striatum.
The cognitive reflection test (CRT) is an experiment task commonly used in Western countries to test intuitive and analytical thinking styles. However, the validity of this task for Chinese ...participants has not been explored. Therefore, this study recruited Chinese college students to finish CRT tasks with various experimental designs. To gauge the accuracy of the CRT tasks, 438 Chinese college students first completed online questionnaires. Participants were then invited to participate in an offline laboratory with the same experimental settings. Finally, time pressure was used to strictly control intuition and analytical thinking to explore the performance of Chinese college students on CRT tasks. The results show that of the three experiments, Chinese college students had the highest accuracy in the offline test, and the CRT's intuitive conflict problem still applies to Chinese students under the time-limited condition. This study demonstrates the validity of the CRT in China and proves that time pressure is an effective method for identifying individuals with strong logic ability.
The electrophysiological correlates of experiencing novelty in creative advertising were studied in 28 healthy subjects using event-related potentials. Participants viewed images that were difficult ...to interpret until a description was presented providing either a creative description (CD) featuring an unexpected description of the image based on the original advertisement, or a normal description (ND), which was a literal description of the image (and served as a baseline condition). Participants evaluated the level of creativity of the description. The results showed that the N2 amplitude was higher for CDs than for NDs across middle and right scalp regions between 240 and 270 ms, most likely reflecting conflict detection. Moreover, CDs demonstrated greater N400 than NDs in a time window between 380 and 500 ms, it is argued that this reflects semantic integration. The present study investigates the electrophysiological correlates of experiencing novelty in advertising with ecologically valid stimuli. This substantially extends the findings of earlier laboratory studies with more artificial stimuli.
Efficiently perceiving a threatening intention conveyed by others' bodily actions has great survival value. The current study examined if the human brain is sensitive to differences in intentions ...that are conveyed via bodily actions. For this purpose, a new intention categorization task was developed in which participants sat in front of a computer screen on which the pictures of highly threatening (HT), moderately threatening (MT), and non-threatening (NT) body actions were presented randomly. Participants were asked to press the corresponding buttons using threatening intention judgment, while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. According to a cluster permutation test, we analyzed N190, N2, EPP (early posterior positivity), and P3. The results showed there was a positive correlation between the amplitude of the EPP induced by three kinds of body actions and the reaction time of the task. The results also revealed that when the deflection of EPP was less positive, the reaction time was shorter. We suggest that EPP might be useful as an index of body intention processing of the brain. The current study revealed that intention perception of body actions modulates brain processing.
Self-positivity bias is one of the well-studied psychological phenomena, however, little is known about the bias in the specific dimension on social interaction, which we called herein interpersonal ...self-positivity bias-people tend to evaluate themselves more positively on social interactions, prefer to be included rather than to be excluded by others. In the present study, we used a modified self-reference task associated with N400 to verify such bias and explore whether impoverished social interaction (loneliness) could modulate it. Findings showed that exclusion verbs elicited larger N400 amplitudes than inclusion verbs, suggesting that most people have interpersonal self-positivity bias. However, loneliness was significantly correlated with N400 effect, showing those with high scores of loneliness had smaller differences in the N400 than those with lower scores. These findings indicated impoverished social interaction weakens interpersonal self-positivity bias; however, the underlying mechanisms need to be explored in future research.
A number of major inventions in history have been based on bionic imitation. Heuristics, by applying biological systems to the creation of artificial devices and machines, might be one of the most ...critical processes in scientific innovation. In particular, prototype heuristics propositions that innovation may engage automatic activation of a prototype such as a biological system to form novel associations between a prototype's function and problem-solving. We speculated that the cortical dissociation between the automatic activation and forming novel associations in innovation is critical point to heuristic creativity. In the present study, novel and old scientific innovations (NSI and OSI) were selected as experimental materials in using learning-testing paradigm to explore the neural basis of scientific innovation induced by heuristic prototype. College students were required to resolve NSI problems (to which they did not know the answers) and OSI problems (to which they knew the answers). From two fMRI experiments, our results showed that the subjects could resolve NSI when provided with heuristic prototypes. In Experiment 1, it was found that the lingual gyrus (LG; BA18) might be related to prototype heuristics in college students resolving NSI after learning a relative prototype. In Experiment 2, the LG (BA18) and precuneus (BA31) were significantly activated for NSI compared to OSI when college students learned all prototypes one day before the test. In addition, the mean beta-values of these brain regions of NSI were all correlated with the behavior accuracy of NSI. As our hypothesis indicated, the findings suggested that the LG might be involved in forming novel associations using heuristic information, while the precuneus might be involved in the automatic activation of heuristic prototype during scientific innovation.
Background
Flail chest is a common and serious traumatic condition in thoracic surgery. The treatment of flail chest often includes open reduction and internal fixation, which is relatively ...traumatic, complicated, and expensive. As three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is widely used in the clinical field, the application of 3D-printed products to chest trauma will become a new treatment option. To date, the use of 3D-printed external fixation guides for flail chests has not been reported. Thus, we aimed to assess the short-term efficacy of a new technology that treated flail chests with an individualized 3D-printed external fixation guide combined with video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS).
Patients and methods
A retrospective analysis was performed on patients with flail chest treated with this new technique at our center from January 2020 to December 2022. The following parameters were included: operative time, thoracic tube extraction time, intensive care unit time, thoracic volume recovery rate, visual analog scale score 1 month postoperatively, and postoperative complication rate. All patients were followed up for at least 3 months.
Results
Five patients (mean age: 45.7 years) were enrolled; they successfully underwent surgery without chest wall deformity and quickly returned to daily life. The average number of rib fractures was 8.4; all patients had lung contusion, hemopneumothorax, and anomalous respiration. The abnormal breathing of all patients was completely corrected on postoperative day 1, and the chest wall was stable. One case experienced mild loosening of the 3D-printed guide postoperatively; however, the overall stability was not affected. The other four cases did not experience such loosening because we replaced the ordinary silk wire with a steel wire. All cases were discharged from the hospital 2 weeks postoperatively and returned to normal life 1 month after the removal of the 3D-printed guide on average. Only one case developed a superficial wound infection postoperatively, and no perioperative death occurred.
Conclusions
The 3D-printed external fixation guide combined with video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery is a novel technique in the treatment of flail chest and is safe, effective, feasible, and minimally invasive, with satisfactory clinical efficacy.
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