How stereotype threat affects the brain dynamics of creative thinking in female students.

When people are placed in a situation where they are at risk of substantiating a negative stereotype about their social group (a scenario termed stereotype threat), the extra pressure to avoid this outcome can undermine their performance. Substantial and consistent gender disparities in STEM fields leave women vulnerable to stereotype threat, including the stereotype that women are not as good at generating creative and innovative ideas as men. We tested whether female students' creative thinking is affected by a stereotype threat by measuring power in the alpha frequency band (8-12Hz oscillations) that has been associated with better creative thinking outcomes. Counter to expectations that a stereotype threat would reduce alpha power associated with creative thinking, analyses showed increased alpha power following the introduction of the stereotype threat. This outcome suggests that women may have attempted to increase their internal attention during the task in order to disprove the stereotype. Behaviorally, this effort did not lead to changes in creative performance, suggesting that the stereotype threat decoupled alpha power from creative thinking outcomes. These results support a growing school of thought in the neuroscience of creativity literature that the alpha power often seen in conjunction with creative behavior is not necessarily related to the creativity processes themselves, but rather might be part of a larger network modulating the distribution of attentional resources more broadly.

Engineering creativity: Prior experience modulates electrophysiological responses to novel metaphors.

Novel metaphorical language use exemplifies human creativity through production and comprehension of meaningful linguistic expressions that may have never been heard before. Available electrophysiological research demonstrates, however, that novel metaphor comprehension is cognitively costly, as it requires integrating information from distantly related concepts. Herein, we investigate if such cognitive cost may be reduced as a factor of prior domain knowledge. To this end, we asked engineering and nonengineering students to read for comprehension literal, novel metaphorical, and anomalous sentences related to engineering or general knowledge, while undergoing EEG recording. Upon reading each sentence, participants were asked to judge whether or not the sentence was original in meaning (novelty judgment) and whether or not it made sense (sensicality judgment). When collapsed across groups, our findings demonstrate a gradual N400 modulation with N400 being maximal in response to anomalous, followed by metaphorical, and literal sentences. Between-group comparisons revealed a mirror effect on the N400 to novel metaphorical sentences, with attenuated N400 in engineers and enhanced N400 in non-engineers. Critically, planned comparisons demonstrated reduced N400 amplitudes to engineering novel metaphors in engineers relative to non-engineers, pointing to an effect of prior knowledge on metaphor processing. This reduction, however, was observed in the absence of a sentence type × knowledge × group interaction. Altogether, our study provides novel evidence suggesting that prior domain knowledge may have a direct impact on creative language comprehension.

Dynamic patient grouping and prioritization: a new approach to emergency department flow improvement.

The demand on emergency departments (ED) is variable and ever increasing, often leaving them overcrowded. Many hospitals are utilizing triage algorithms to rapidly sort and classify patients based on the severity of their injury or illness, however, most current triage methods are prone to over- or under-triage. In this paper, the group technology (GT) concept is applied to the triage process to develop a dynamic grouping and prioritization (DGP) algorithm. This algorithm identifies most appropriate patient groups and prioritizes them according to patient- and system-related information. Discrete event simulation (DES) has been implemented to investigate the impact of the DGP algorithm on the performance measures of the ED system. The impact was studied in comparison with the currently used triage algorithm, i.e., emergency severity index (ESI). The DGP algorithm outperforms the ESI algorithm by shortening patients' average length of stay (LOS), average time to bed (TTB), time in emergency room, and lowering the percentage of tardy patients and their associated risk in the system.