Malaie lead a team that linked different sorts of foraging behavior to creativity, further tying how we think now to how we thought during our earliest days as a species. The investigators report that “According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. . . . we investigate whether creativity builds on our capacity to forage in space (‘creativity as strategic foraging’). We report systematic connections between specific forms of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding strategies for searching in space. U.S. American adults completed two tasks designed to measure creativity. Before each creativity trial, participants completed an unrelated search of a city map. Between subjects, we manipulated the search pattern, with some participants seeking multiple, dispersed spatial locations and others repeatedly converging on the same location. Participants who searched divergently in space were better at divergent thinking but worse at convergent thinking; this pattern reversed for participants who had converged repeatedly on a single location. These results demonstrate a targeted link between foraging and creativity.”
Soran Malaie, Michael Spivey, and Tyler Marghetis. “Divergent and Convergent Creativity are Different Kinds of Foraging.” Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241245695