This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of divergent and convergent tasks on intermediate EFL students' reading comprehension success. The participants of this study involved sixty male and female EFL learners who were enrolled in the intermediate level at Kish English Institute in Yasuj. To make them homogeneous in terms of their general English knowledge, they were asked to take p...

Introduction: Recent studies have revealed the possibility of learning skills through alternative methods and repetitive tactile stimulation without explicit training. This study aimed to examine the effect of involuntary tactile stimulation on the memory and creativity of healthy participants. Methods: A group of 92 right-handed students participated in this study voluntarily. They were assig...

Human creativity has been claimed to rely on the neurotransmitter dopamine, but evidence is still sparse. We studied whether individual performance (N=117) in divergent thinking (alternative uses task) and convergent thinking (remote association task) can be predicted by the individual spontaneous eye blink rate (EBR), a clinical marker of dopaminergic functioning. EBR predicted flexibility in ...

An investigation was conducted into sources of error within a safety-critical software design task. A number of convergent methods of task- and error-analysis were systematically applied: hierarchical task analysis (HTA), error log audit, error observation, work sample and laboratory experiment. HTA, which provided the framework for the deployment of subsequent methods, revealed possible weakne...

Creativity is one of the most important cognitive skills in our complex and fast-changing world. Previous correlative evidence showed that gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is involved in divergent but not convergent thinking. In the current study, a placebo/sham-controlled, randomized between-group design was used to test a causal relation between vagus nerve and creativity. We employed transcuta...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that creative people sometimes use food to overcome mental blocks and lack of inspiration, but empirical support for this possibility is still lacking. In this study we investigated whether performance in tasks assumed to assess convergent and divergent thinking (components of human creativity) is promoted by the food supplement LTyrosine (TYR)—a biochemical precurso...

Segmentation and tracking of cells in long-term time-lapse experiments has emerged as a powerful method to understand how tissue shape changes emerge from the complex choreography of constituent cells. However, methods to store and interrogate the large datasets produced by these experiments are not widely available. Furthermore, recently developed methods for relating tissue shape changes to c...