HUMAN COGNITION LABORATORY
PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT
OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY

Individual Differences in Creative Problem Solving
Graduate Researcher: Ross May

For many problems, solutions may be reached via a routine, incremental, or analytic solution processes. However, in some cases, problem solving progress is suggested to rely on more "insightful" means involving intuitive, creative or discontinuous solution processes. A special case of creative problem solving occurs when problems are unfamiliar and misleading (called insight problems). Working memory is the executive and attentional aspect of short-term memory involved in the interim integration, processing, disposal, and retrieval of information. We are systematically manipulating insight problems and conditions of the problem solving environment to see if solution success differs according to one's working memory capacity.

Hindsight Differences between Judgment Tasks
Graduate Researcher: Ross May

The hindsight bias effectis a commonly studied memory phenomenon in which people's memory for their prior judgments is affected by the actual outcome of the situation. In other words, after the fact, people falselytend to think that they knew what was going to happen. Some researchers have proposed that all hindsight effects are caused by common cognitive processes. Other researchers have proposed that hindsight bias effects are actually a set of different phenomenon caused by different cognitive processes that all lead to similar effects (changes in judgments based on exposure to outcome information). In these studies we are systematically testing different unitary and non-unitary theories of the hindsight bias effect.

Creativity and Group Problem-Solving
Graduate Researcher: Viktoria Tidikis

The purpose of this study is to examine how working within a group versus working alone affects creative problem-solving and what role gender plays in influencing problem-solving performance. Previous studies contradictory results as to whether working in a group improves or impedes creative problem solving performance and whether gender has an effect on the group performance. The contradictory results of the previous may be due to the gender by group interaction.

Emotion, Attention & Creativity
Graduate Researcher: Viktoria Tidikis

This project examines how valence of emotions influences creative performance. The predominant view in the field holds that positive emotions enhance creativity while negative emotions stifle it. However, some studies show that in some cases negative emotions foster the creative process while positive emotions impede it. We are investigating if the relationships between emotional valence and attentional processing my explain these disparate findings.

A decision to trust or not to trust can be examined within a broader category of cognition called decisions under uncertainty. The purpose of this study is to investigate trust decisions through the lens of the hindsight bias effect. The hindsight bias effect (sometimes known as the "I knew it all along effect") is a consequence that often follows judgments under uncertainty, and will be defined and outlined through various competing theories that seek to explain it. Since trust is also considered a judgment under uncertainty, an examination will be made of trust decisions through the lens of hindsight bias research, in participant's evaluations of trust outcomes. It is hypothesized that recollections of trust judgments are subject to hindsight bias effects under certain conditions, especially those during the metacognitive experience following a mildly surprising outcome.