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Springer, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5(20), p. 1011-1016, 2013

DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0413-4

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Increasing self–other integration through divergent thinking

Journal article published in 2013 by Lorenza S. Colzato, Wery P. M. van den Wildenberg, Bernhard Hommel ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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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.