October 6, 2023

Children’s Day is celebrated on October 6, 2023 in Singapore. As Singapore transitions towards a knowledge-based economy, it is increasingly important to cultivate creativity in the population, including the younger generation. However, there is not enough understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying creativity and how they are affected by specific ways of information processing.

In ‘The Role of Visual Abilities and Cognitive Style in Artistic and Scientific Creativity of Singaporean Secondary School Students’ (Journal of Creative Behavior, 2021), Associate Professor Maria Kozhevnikov (NUS Psychology), Ms Shuen Ho (NUS Psychology), and Dr Elizabeth Koh (NTU) investigated the relationship between visual abilities, visual cognitive style (one’s way of perceiving things), and artistic and scientific creativities (one’s creativity in relation to art or science subjects). They aimed to understand whether scientific and artistic creativities develop concurrently with the corresponding visual abilities or only under the influence of professional exposure, which occurs at a later stage of a student’s life.

The study was conducted among two groups of secondary school students in Singapore. Participants’ cognitive styles were evaluated through questions such as whether their mental pictures are very detailed and precise representations of real things or more like schematic representations of objects and events.

The results supported the hypothesis that even in students aged 13 to14, different students’ scientific and artistic creativities have started to vary. Certain visual cognitive styles (how one sees things) are strongly associated with scientific creativities, while others are linked to artistic creativities. Singaporean students also tend to exhibit the spatial style of cognition more often, meaning that they prefer thinking and learning visually. This cognitive style profile is very different from those of Russian and US secondary school students and is rather similar to that of US college students majoring in science, which could be due to the strong emphasis on sciences and mathematics in Singapore’s education system.

The researchers suggest that education and social-cultural background are critical for the development of specific types of creativity, be it scientific or artistic. Exposure to art or science topics in depth and a suitable learning environment are therefore important for students to develop their creativities.

Read the article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jocb.522?af=R