Linden J. Ball

University of Central Lancashire | UCLAN · Faculty of Science and Technology

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive a...

Creative design concepts are often viewed as developing iteratively, with the design problem and solutions ‘co-evolving’ in a mutually adaptive manner. We report a study examining whether the co-evolution concept captures the creativity arising in collaborative, team-based design practice, which has not previously been assessed from a co-evolution...

We report an experiment investigating the “special-process” theory of insight problem solving, which claims that insight arises from non-conscious, non-reportable processes that enable problem re-structuring. We predicted that reducing opportunities for speech-based processing during insight problem solving should permit special processes to functi...

Prior research suggests that reducing font clarity can cause people to consider printed information more carefully. The most famous demonstration showed that participants were more likely to solve counterintuitive math problems when they were printed in hard-to-read font. However, after pooling data from that experiment with 16 attempts to replicat...

Meta-reasoning refers to the metacognitive processes that monitor and control ongoing thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. These monitoring processes are usually experienced as feelings of “certainty” or “uncertainty” regarding how well a process is unfolding. The “meta-reasoning framework” advanced by Ackerman and Thompson (2017) captures many...

Stress is a major external factor threatening creative activity. The study explored whether left-lateralized activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex manipulated through transcranial direct current stimulation could alleviate stress-induced impairment in creativity. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to explore the underlying ne...

Meta-reasoning refers to the metacognitive processes that monitor and control ongoing thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. These monitoring processes are usually experienced as feelings of “certainty” or “uncertainty” regarding how well a process is unfolding. The “meta-reasoning framework” advanced by Ackerman and Thompson (2017) captures many...

We discuss significant challenges to assumptions of exclusivity and highlight methodological and conceptual pitfalls in inferring deliberative processes from reasoning responses. Causes of normative-deliberative gaps are considered (e.g., disputed or misunderstood normative standards, strategy preferences, task interpretations, cognitive ability, m...

Findings relating to the impact of mindfulness interventions on creative performance remain inconsistent, perhaps because of discrepancies between study designs, including variability in the length of mindfulness interventions, the absence of control groups or the tendencies to explore creativity as one unitary construct. To derive a clearer unders...

The current study aimed: (i) to identify personal characteristics associated with endorsing conspiracy theories; and (ii) to investigate methods for dispelling conspiracy beliefs. Participants were shown a single conspiracy theory and they also completed questionnaires about their reasoning skills, types of information processing (System 1 vs. Syst...

With the ever-changing social environment, individual creativity is facing a severe challenge induced by stress. However, little is known about the physiological mechanisms by which acute stress affects creative cognitive processing. The current study explored the effects of neuroendocrine response on creativity under stress and its underlying cogn...

As climate impacts become more visible, an increasing number of people experience or hear about distressing events such as flooding, landscape change and biodiversity loss. Most of these reports refer to specific places. It is therefore likely that people’s relationships with these places influence their perception of the climate crisis overall. In...

Creativity lies at the heart of effective advertising, pervading all aspects of the advertising process, including the planning, design and evaluation of advertisements right through to their execution as well as subsequent campaigning and communication. Most studies of creativity in advertising have assessed the stages though which creativity aris...

Introduction: Whether the post-categorical, semantic properties of task-irrelevant speech are processed has been a source of debate between two central accounts. The first, a structural account, proposes that the semantic content of irrelevant speech is filtered out early on, and thus remains unprocessed. The second account proposes that the semant...

To maximize marketing effectiveness many conscious and unconscious elements are simultaneously employed within campaign advertising. However, little is known about the individual contributions that conscious and unconscious processes make to the cognitive effectiveness of creative advertisements, some of which may also induce insight experiences. T...

The construct of psychological distance has gained traction as an explanation of why climate change is difficult to act on; it often feels far removed, with impacts arising in remote locations to other people or in an uncertain future. However, recent studies and narrative reviews have pointed out inconsistencies in the conceptualisation, operation...

Sounds that deviate, acoustically or semantically, from prevailing auditory backgrounds disrupt ongoing mental activity. An acoustic deviant is held to capture attention, but doubt has been cast on the attentional nature of the semantic, categorical deviation effect. Unlike the acoustical deviation effect, which is typically amenable to top-down co...

Objective Develop and investigate the potential of a remote, computer-mediated and synchronous text-based triage, which we refer to as InSort, for quickly highlighting persons of interest after an insider attack. Background Insiders maliciously exploit legitimate access to impair the confidentiality and integrity of organizations. The globalisatio...

People consistently act in ways that harm the environment, even when believing their actions are environmentally friendly. A case in point is a biased judgment termed the negative footprint illusion , which arises when people believe that the addition of “eco-friendly” items (e.g., environmentally certified houses) to conventional items (e.g., stan...

Sudden insight is often observed during creative problem solving and studies have suggested that advertisements can likewise evoke an insight experience. To date, however, there is limited empirical evidence on whether advertisements can trigger ideational insight, and, if so, whether such insight plays a role in advertising memorability. This stud...

The construct of psychological distance has gained traction as an explanation of why climate change is difficult to act on; it often feels far removed, with impacts arising in remote locations to other people or in an uncertain future. However, recent studies and narrative reviews have pointed out inconsistencies in the conceptualisation, operation...

Eye-movement measures are popular in User Experience (UX) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research as a way to provide insights into the factors that hinder the usability of computer-based technologies. In this chapter we overview the various eye-movement metrics employed in UX and HCI research. In addition, we summarise studies that have used...

Sticky notes abound as a material in design practice, yet their use is under-explored empirically and theoretically. We address the research question: how do sticky notes support design cognition and collaboration when compared to other kinds of design materials? We compare four types of design materials (sketches, prototypes, cards, sticky notes)...

People’s belief that one or more environmentally friendly items that are added to a set of conventional items can reduce the total environmental impact of these items (the negative footprint illusion) could lead to unwanted environmental consequences. An averaging bias seems to underpin this illusion: people make their estimates based on the averag...

Controversy exists regarding the processes involved in creative thinking with the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and the Compound Remote Associates Test (CRAT). We report three experiments that aimed to shed light on the component processes underpinning CRAT performance by using the mere presence of task-irrelevant sound as a key theoretical tool. Ex...

Accompanying the growing call for ecological sustainability, environmental advertising is playing an increasingly important role in green marketing to foster environmental concern and pro-environmental behavior. The present study examined the impact of two factors on people’s selective attention to green advertisements: advertising creativity (by c...

Previous studies have revealed that creative advertisements are recognized and recalled better than their less creative counterparts. Remembering and forgetting are two sides of the same coin of memory, denoting memory’s storage and elimination functions, respectively, which can both potentially impact advertising effectiveness. To date, there appe...

This chapter overviews the nature of creative cognition, adopting a dual-process framework whereby idea generation typically involves the operation of implicit, associative processes that drive the generation of so-called “preinventive forms”, whereas idea exploration typically involves the operation of explicit, analytic processes that develop and...

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while produc...

Sparked by concerns with increased domain fragmentation in design research, we explored indicators of expansion, integration and consolidation in this area of enquiry through the lens of publications in Design Studies across the 40-years since the journal's inception. We examined several key indicators, including authors' disciplinary affiliations,...

In this article we review progress that has been made in advancing a theoretical understanding of design cognition and design metacognition. We identify a high level of consistency in empirical findings, including good evidence for core design strategies such as conjecture-based problem formulation, problem–solution co-evolution, analogical reasoni...

Background music has been claimed to enhance people’s creativity (Ritter & Ferguson, 2017). In three experiments we investigated the impact of background music on performance of Compound Remote Associate Tasks (CRATs), which are widely thought to tap creativity. Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics (Experiment 1), instrumental music wi...

Recent investigations have established the value of using rebus puzzles in studying the insight and analytic processes that underpin problem solving. The current study sought to validate a pool of 84 rebus puzzles in terms of their solution rates, solution times, error rates, solution confidence, self-reported solution strategies, and solution phra...

Telephone conversation is ubiquitous within the office setting. Overhearing a telephone conversation—whereby only one of the two speakers is heard—is subjectively more annoying and objectively more distracting than overhearing a full conversation. The present study sought to determine whether this "halfalogue" effect is attributable to unexpected o...

We report an experiment investigating how stimulus complexity and conceptual fluency (i.e., the ease of deriving meaning) influence aesthetic liking judgments for abstract artworks. We presented participants with paintings at two levels of complexity (high vs. low) and five levels of conceptual fluency (determined from a prior norming study) and re...

We investigated the capacity for two different forms of metacognitive cue to shield against auditory distraction in problem solving with Compound Remote Associates Tasks (CRATs). Experiment 1 demonstrated that an intrinsic metacognitive cue in the form of processing disfluency (manipulated using an easy-to-read vs. difficult-to-read font) could inc...

Previous design research has demonstrated how epistemic uncertainty engenders localized, creative reasoning, including analogizing and mental simulation. We analyzed not just the short-term, localized effects of epistemic uncertainty on creative processing and information selection, but also its long-term impact on downstream creative processes. Ou...

We report a study examining the role of ‘cognitive miserliness’ as a determinant of poor performance on the standard three-item Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The cognitive miserliness hypothesis proposes that people often respond incorrectly on CRT items because of an unwillingness to go beyond default, heuristic processing and invest time and e...

Cell-phone conversation is ubiquitous within public spaces. The current study investigates whether ignored cell-phone conversation impairs eyewitness memory for a perpetrator. Participants viewed a video of a staged crime in the presence of 1 side of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful halfalogue), 2 sides of a comprehensible cell-...

This chapter addresses the situated, embodied and interactive characteristics of problem solving by focusing on the cues that arise within a solver’s external environment. In examining the influence of external cues on problem solving we have been heavily influenced by Kirsh’s (The Cambridge handbook of situated cognition, Cambridge University Pres...

Research is presented that focused on the impact of varying types of background music on the performance of a task thought to tap creativity: the compound remote associate task (CRAT). Findings from three experiments revealed that background music with: foreign lyrics, familiar lyrics and instrumental music without lyrics all significantly impaired...

Creativity is a vital aspect of cognition underpinning activities such as innovative product design, scientific advancement and effective advertising and marketing communications. With a recent trend toward the popularity of coffee-shop environments for individual study or office style working, the role that ambient noise can play in influencing cr...

We integrated two research traditions – one focusing on analogical reasoning, the other on knowledge sharing – with the aim of examining how designers’ unique knowledge backgrounds can fuel analogy-based creativity. The present dataset afforded a unique opportunity to pursue this aim since the design dialogue derived from team members with highly d...

Examining the role of implicit, unconscious thinking on reasoning, decision making, problem solving, creativity, and its neurocognitive basis, for a genuinely psychological conception of rationality. This volume contributes to a current debate within the psychology of thought that has wide implications for our ideas about creativity, decision makin...

We examined evaluative reasoning taking place during expert ‘design critiques’. We focused on key dimensions of creative evaluation (originality, functionality and aesthetics) and ways in which these dimensions impact reasoning strategies and suggestions offered by experts for how the student could continue. Each dimension was associated with a spe...

This volume contributes to a current debate within the psychology of thought that has wide implications for our ideas about creativity, decision making, and economic behavior. The essays focus on the role of implicit, unconscious thinking in creativity and problem solving, the interaction of intuition and analytic thinking, and the relationship bet...

Recent research has shown that memory illusions can successfully prime both children's and adults' performance on complex, insight-based problems (compound remote associates tasks or CRATs). The current research aimed to clarify the locus of these priming effects. Like before, Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists were selected to prime subsequent C...

The aim of the reported study was to gain further insight into how two cognitive strategies – analogical reasoning and mental simulation – influence team dynamics in innovative product design. A particular emphasis was placed on exploring the association between these two strategies and team cohesion and team collaboration. Analogies were coded for...

Like true memories, false memories are capable of priming answers to insight-based problems. Recent research has attempted to extend this paradigm to more advanced problem-solving tasks, including those involving verbal analogical reasoning. However, these experiments are constrained inasmuch as problem solutions could be generated via spreading ac...

We report a study that examined the modulating impact of contingent self-esteem on regret intensity for regretted outcomes associated with controllable versus uncontrollable events. The Contingent Self-Esteem Scale (e.g., Kernis & Goldman, 2006) was used to assess the extent to which a person’s sense of self-worth is based on self and others’ expec...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of research aimed at removing the mystery from insight and creative problem solving. The present special issue reflects this expanding field. Overall the papers gathered here converge on a nuanced view of insight and creative thinking as arising from multiple processes that can yield surprising solutions th...

The rationality paradox centres on the observation that people are highly intelligent, yet show evidence of errors and biases in their thinking when measured against normative standards. Elqayam and Evans (e.g., 2011) reject normative standards in the psychological study of thinking, reasoning and deciding in favour of a ‘value-free’ descriptive ap...

Research suggests that banner advertisements used in online marketing are often overlooked, especially when positioned horizontally on webpages. Such inattention invariably gives rise to an inability to remember advertising brands and messages, undermining the effectiveness of this marketing method. Recent interest has focused on whether human face...

The authors regret that Dr. Melanie Pitchford’s name has been misspelt in the ‘‘Acknowledgements’’ of this article. The corrected acknowledgement should read: ‘‘We would like to thank Melanie Pitchford for her help programming Experiments 2a and 2b.’’

Priming children’s analogical reasoning with true and false memories: a comparison of relation and solution priming.

In this paper we develop an idea first mooted by Wilkinson, Ball, and Cooper (2010), which is that the dichotomy between theorybased and simulation-based reasoning in the context of mental state understanding is synonymous with the distinction between intuitive and reflective thinking in dual-process accounts of human reasoning (e.g., Evans, 2010)....

In this reply, we provide an analysis of Alter et al. (2013) response to our earlier paper (Thompson et al., 2013). In that paper, we reported difficulty in replicating Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre’s (2007) main finding, namely that a sense of disfluency produced by making stimuli difficult to perceive, increased accuracy on a variety of rea...

The act of conducting an insider attack carries with it cognitive and social challenges that may affect an offender's day-to-day work behavior. We test this hypothesis by examining the language used in e-mails that were sent as part of a 6-hr workplace simulation. The simulation involved participants (N = 54) examining databases and exchanging info...

We investigated priming of analogical problem solutions with true and false memories. Children and adults were asked to solve nine verbal proportional analogies, three of which had been primed by Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists where the critical lure (and problem solution) was presented as the initial word in the list (true memory priming), t...

When the validity of a deductive conclusion conflicts with its believability people often respond in a belief-biased manner. The present study examined how belief bias might be ameliorated by providing evaluative feedback on responses (i.e., simple correct/incorrect assessments). The research utilised a microgenetic method involving intensive reaso...