Ricerc@Sapienza

Divergent thinking involves the ability to find many different and new responses or solutions to open-ended problems. The ability to think divergently has been associated with different cognitive processes, including intuitive and rational thinking styles. However, research has not specifically addressed the extent to which divergent thinking is associated to decision-making styles, which involve habits to react in a certain way in specific decisional contexts.

Dance represents an opportunity to promote not only motor skills but also other cognitive functions and general well-being. In this study, 58 children aged 6-10 years were enrolled in order to test the issue if dance improves divergent thinking in motor and visual domains (domain-general and domain-specificity hypotheses), and whether the topological map of the body mediates their performance at the motor task (mediation hypothesis). Therefore, 33 children practicing dance were compared with a control group (25 children).

Musical expertise has positive effects on cognition, especially on verbal and linguistic processing. In this study
the relationships between musical expertise, not involving improvisation training, and divergent thinking were
explored. Expert and self-taught musicians were tested in musical, verbal and visual divergent thinking, and
were compared with a group of non-musicians in verbal and visual divergent thinking. The musical task required
to generate many different pieces of music using the incipit of ‘Happy Birthday’ as a starting point; the verbal