title: 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 cognitive-control 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.
authors: Leiden University Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden, The Netherlands, colzato@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
authors: Lorenza S
authors: LS
authors: Colzato
authors: Wery P M
authors: WP
authors: van den Wildenberg
authors: Bernhard
authors: B
authors: Hommel
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011897:Random Allocation; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult