Creative problem solving (CPS) in real-world contexts often relies on reorganization of existing knowledge to serve new, problem-relevant functions. However, classic creativity paradigms that minimize knowledge content are generally used to investigate creativity, including CPS. To better understand the real-world CPS, we developed a prototype heuristic paradigm based on the real-life CPS situation. This talk focused on the concept of paradigm, the cognitive and neural mechanisms of CPS in knowledge-rich fields.

Since the 1950s, problem solving has been closely linked to search. State spaces and heuristics were central concepts for explaining the steps from an initial state to a solution. Later, researchers examined underlying mechanisms such as spreading activation, constraints, and their interaction with search. More recently, the focus has shifted to the dynamics and preconditions of search and impasse. Looking ahead, large language models and their underlying processes may offer, but also need new ways to understand search within vast knowledge spaces.

Typically, the metacognitive approach is employed to expose how people infer their own confidence level and regulate their thinking efforts. In our novel approach to creativity research, we use the metacognitive approach to study factors that affect judgments of originality. Specifically, we expose factors that affect judgments of originality, but not actual originality, and vice versa. We also expose associations between individuals’ semantic memory structure and metacognition of originality. This line of research carries potential to inspire future research into creativity thinking processes.

Insight problem-solving has captivated scientists and thinkers for over a century. This talk synthesizes recent advances in the neuroscientific study of insight, offering a comprehensive view of the physiological and cognitive markers that characterize Aha! experiences. Drawing on evidence from EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking, and pupillometry, I will outline how insight is preceded by a distinct pattern of internal attention allocation and disengagement from external stimuli, often indexed by increased eye blinking and alpha-band activity. I will discuss the right anterior temporal lobe’s central role in semantic integration and finally, I will present converging evidence that pupil dilation may serve as a physiological marker of the moment a solution transitions from unconscious processing into conscious awareness. Together, these findings support a model of insight as a discrete, internally driven cognitive event with neural and behavioral signatures, shedding new light on the mechanisms of creativity and problem-solving.

Uncertainty is one of the key features of modern art. Poetry often uses unusual combinations of words, while visual art uses abstract forms and non-standard applications of everyday objects in gallery spaces. Modern philosophers discuss the cognitive value of such uncertainty, contrasting it with completeness, which rigidly structures the thought process. This report will examine uncertainty in both visual and verbal art. It will be shown how the combination of semantically inconsistent visual and textual stimuli in contemporary art and poetry contributes to the formation of distant associations and increases the cognitive accessibility of metaphors and symbols.

Thinking and cognitive control are considered to be high-level processes that do not depend on basic cognitive and motor processes. In my report, I will talk about new ideas and experiments that show how motor skills, learning, and emotions regulate our thinking and control processes.

Recognition of a familiar experience among a new one is contextual: for example, it is more difficult to recognize the face of a suspect glimpsed among 8 similar faces than among 4 dissimilar ones. In my report, I will demonstrate that behind seemingly variable and context-dependent patterns of visual recognition, there may be profoundly invariant mnemonic representations that are significantly similar between different people. I will also demonstrate that recognition in a context (for example, in the multi-alternative forced-choice task) can be accurately predicted by knowing the mnemic properties of each object that makes up this context - its tendency to cause true or false identification. I will also demonstrate the unusual phenomenon of asymmetric recognition in context, which is a problem for dominant contextual memory models, but is well predicted by the invariant representation model.

The concept of a task is widely used in cognitive psychology and kinesiology, but there is still no generally accepted definition in science. Despite the fact that this concept emphasizes the subjectivity and purposeful nature of human interaction with the environment and also plays a key role in planning and conducting experiments, it is insufficiently represented both in theoretical models of cognition and in empirical research. We will look at various definitions of the task and focus on the central role of this concept in Bernstein’s physiology of activity and in the Russian psychology of perception, and we will also discuss how this concept can become a system-forming one for cognitive psychology and how research on the construction of movements, perception, attention and solving mental problems can be included in the overall structure of the analysis of purposeful human activity.

The report will be devoted to a brief overview of evidence-based (i.e., practices whose effectiveness has been confirmed by scientific research) and non-evidence-based (widespread, but not scientifically proven) practices used in global approaches to the education of gifted schoolchildren.

Scientific progress is often facilitated by researchers drawing connections between their phenomena of interest and concepts from other scientific fields or everyday life. For example, atoms have been productively compared to plum puddings, and brains to computers. Such metaphors have historically shaped experimental design, theory building, and scientific communication, yet the role of metaphor in scientific reasoning has rarely been studied empirically at scale. In this session, I will share preliminary results from such an empirical study. We asked researchers from diverse fields to think about their phenomena of interest through different metaphors, and we are looking at how these metaphors shape scientists' theories and experiment ideas. We are interested in what kinds of metaphors open up broad and innovative lines of inquiry.