Increasing self–other integration through divergent thinking

Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that people may cognitively represent themselves and others just like any other, nonsocial event. Here, we provide evidence that the degree of self-other integration (as reflected by the joint Simon effect; JSE) is systematically affected by the control characteristics of temporally overlapping but unrelated and nonsocial creativity tasks. In particular, the JSE was found to be larger in the context of a divergent-thinking task (alternate uses task) than in the context of a convergent-thinking task (remote association task). This suggests that self-other integration and action corepresentation are controlled by domain-general cognitivecontrol parameters that regulate the integrativeness (strong vs. weak top-down control and a resulting narrow vs. broad attentional focus) of information processing irrespective of its social implications.

Pointing out mechanisms underlying joint action

“…Joint action-in particular, joint referential pointing-enhances the impact of target processing on the participants' actions, by changing the spatial covert attention processes, which provides a new view on dimensional overlap in spatial compatibility effects like the joint Simon effect (Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, 1990). These findings support a relatively novel view, holding that domain-general cognitive-control processes that adjust the attentional focus impact the amount of self-other integration (Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2013;Liepelt et al, 2012), which may be a central mechanism allowing people to navigate the social world (Heyes, 2014). Specifically, the attentional demand necessary to solve the go-no-go task can have a strong influence on the self-other integration component of the joint condition.…”

Keys and seats: Spatial response coding underlying the joint spatial compatibility effect

“…Performing a task with an unfriendly coactor or a member of an outgroup might decrease the necessity of differentiating between the representation of one's own and the coactor's action, simply because an unfriendly coactor/coactor belonging to one's outgroup is perceived as being more dissimilar to oneself than a friendly coactor/member of one's ingroup. In other words, the representation of self-and other-generated action events is not necessarily a particular personal trait but rather a consequence of a specific (context-dependent) cognitive state (Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2013;Liepelt et al, 2012). Further converging evidence for this assumption comes from a study in which participants performed a joint spatial compatibility task together with a robot (Stenzel et al, 2012).…”

Metacontrol and body ownership: divergent thinking increases the virtual hand illusion

“…1 The experimental setup. a The participant put his/her real hand inside the box while the virtual hand was shown on the screen placed on top of the box; i.e., the virtual hand appeared on top of the real hand (Ma & Hommel, 2015 will report all data but will focus on flexibility (the number of responses, weighted by the number of different categories), the theoretically most transparent measure and the one that in our research turned out to be the most consistent and reliable indicator of divergent thinking (e.g., Akbari Chermahini & Hommel, 2012;Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2013).…”

“…Half of the participants always experienced the synchronous followed by the asynchronous VHI condition in each session, while the other half always experienced the reverse order. Following the protocol of Colzato et al (2013), we interleaved the VHI (synchronous or asynchronous) manipulations with AUT items/RAT versions, so to increase the possibility that creativity task-induced metacontrol states would affect the VHI assessment. The experiment was thus composed of 12 (six synchronous and six asynchronous) VHI manipulations, six RATs, and six AUTs in total.…”

“…For instance, Colzato, van den Wildenberg, and Hommel (2013) found evidence of more self-other integration in a joint Simon task when it was interleaved with an AUT than when it was interleaved with an RAT. Along the same lines, Sellaro, Hommel, de Kwaadsteniet, van de Groep, and Colzato (2014) found more interpersonal trust when participants just completed an AUT than when they just completed an RAT.…”