ReviewFrontiers in psychology2016
Looking for Creativity: Where Do We Look When We Look for New Ideas?
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unveiling the Aha! moment: A computational account of insight in active inference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Visual Strategies of Avoidantly Attached Individuals: Attachment Avoidance and Gaze Behavior in Deceptive Interactions.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- A study of eye movement during dual-task walking in elderly individuals.Journal of physical therapy science · 2025Article
- Gestalt's Perspective on Insight: A Recap Based on Recent Behavioral and Neuroscientific Evidence.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Attentional switch to memory: An early and critical phase of the cognitive cascade allowing autobiographical memory retrieval.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Article
- "The great mixing machine": multisensory integration and brain-breath coupling in the cerebral cortex.Pflugers Archiv : European journal of physiology · 2023Review
- Insight Problem Solving Ability Predicts Reduced Susceptibility to Fake News, Bullshit, and Overclaiming.Thinking & reasoning · 2023Article
- Q-learning model of insight problem solving and the effects of learning traits on creativity.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Motor restrictions impair divergent thinking during walking and during sitting.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Quantifying the roles of conscious and unconscious processing in insight-related memory effectiveness within standard and creative advertising.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Long-Latency Event-Related Potentials (300-1000 ms) of the Visual Insight.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Gaze direction as a facial cue of memory retrieval state.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Enhancement of semantic integration reasoning by tRNS.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Creative Connections: Computational Semantic Distance Captures Individual Creativity and Resting-State Functional Connectivity.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- Eye behavior predicts susceptibility to visual distraction during internally directed cognition.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Article
- Oculometric signature of switch into awareness? Pupil size predicts sudden insight whereas microsaccades predict problem-solving via analysis.NeuroImage · 2020Article
- The relation between state and trait risk taking and problem-solving.Psychological research · 2020Article
- Moment of Truth: Why Aha! Experiences are Correct.The Journal of creative behavior · 2020Article
- Less imageable words lead to more looks to blank locations during memory retrieval.Psychological research · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Recent work using the eye movement monitoring technique has demonstrated that when people are engaged in thought they tend to disengage from the external world by blinking or fixating on an empty portion of the visual field, such as a blank wall, or out the window at the sky. This 'looking at nothing' behavior has been observed during thinking that does not explicitly involve visual imagery (mind wandering, insight in problem solving, memory encoding and search) and it is associated with reduced analysis of the external visual environment. Thus, it appears to indicate (and likely facilitate) a shift of attention from external to internal stimuli that benefits creativity and problem solving by reducing the cognitive load and enhancing attention to internally evolving activation. We briefly mention some possible reasons to collect eye movement data in future studies of creativity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.