Introduction: Many goal‐directed and spontaneous everyday activities (e.g., planning, mind wandering) rely on an internal focus of attention. Internally directed cognition (IDC) was shown to differ from externally directed cognition in a range of neurophysiological indicators such as electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha activity and eye behavior.Methods: In this EEG–eye‐tracking coregistration study, we investigated effects of attention direction on EEG alpha activity and various relevant eye parameters. We used an established paradigm to manipulate internal attention demands in the visual domain within tasks by means of conditional stimulus masking.Results: Consistent with previous research, IDC involved relatively higher EEG alpha activity (lower alpha desynchronization) at posterior cortical sites. Moreover, IDC was characterized by greater pupil diameter (PD), fewer microsaccades, fixations, and saccades. These findings show that internal versus external cognition is associated with robust differences in several indicators at the neural and perceptual level. In a second line of analysis, we explored the intrinsic temporal covariation between EEG alpha activity and eye parameters during rest. This analysis revealed a positive correlation of EEG alpha power with PD especially in bilateral parieto‐occipital regions.Conclusion: Together, these findings suggest that EEG alpha activity and PD represent time‐sensitive indicators of internal attention demands, which may be involved in a neurophysiological gating mechanism serving to shield internal cognition from irrelevant sensory information.

Creativity research crucially relies on creativity evaluations by external raters, but it is not clear what properties characterize good raters. In the present study, we investigated whether rater personality and rater creativity are related to discernment (i.e., the ability to distinguish creative from uncreative responses) when evaluating others’ responses. To this end, 166 novice raters evaluated a pre‐selected set of responses from the alternate uses task for creativity. We further assessed the rater’s creativity and personality and explored the role of task factors such as rating motivation and rating time. We found that creativity in terms of creative potential and creative achievement independently predicted rater discernment. At the level of personality, openness to experience was related to higher discernment, but not any other Big‐Five factors or dark triad traits. Rater discernment also increased with rating time, rating motivation, and rater leniency (i.e., the tendency to appreciate creative responses). Finally, we seized the large rater sample to estimate to what extent inter‐rater reliability depends on rater number and how dependable ratings are across the rating scale. Together, these findings highlight relevant factors at person, task, and method level predicting individual discernment, which should be considered to ensure good inter‐rater reliability in creativity ratings.

Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to 1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by human raters and 2) further advance the developments toward automating creativity evaluations. Over the course of two prior studies, participants generated 989 four-word sentences based on a four-letter prompt with the instruction to be creative. We developed an algorithm that scores each sentence on eight different metrics including 1) general word infrequency, 2) word combination infrequency, 3) context-specific word uniqueness, 4) syntax uniqueness, 5) rhyme, 6) phonetic similarity, and similarity of 7) sequence spelling and 8) semantic meaning to the cue. The text metrics were then used to explain the averaged creativity ratings of eight human raters. We found six metrics to be significantly correlated with the human ratings, explaining a total of 16% of their variance. We conclude that the creative impression of sentences is partly driven by different aspects of novelty in word choice and syntax, as well as rhythm and sound, which are amenable to objective assessment.

Creative behaviors are increasingly impacted by digital technologies, but little is known about the way digital technologies support everyday creativity and what factors predict their creative use. We investigated to what extent individual differences in person‐specific (creativity, personality) and platform‐specific (e.g., perceived creativity support) characteristics relate to the creative use of Instagram. The results from a sample of 191 Instagram users revealed that more frequent creative use of Instagram was related to greater engagement in everyday creative behaviors, creative self‐beliefs, the openness facet of creative imagination, extraversion, a more positive attitude toward Instagram, greater platform‐related self‐efficacy, and greater perceived creativity‐support. Regression analysis further revealed a unique contribution of everyday creativity, creative personal identity, extraversion, attitude toward Instagram, Instagram self‐efficacy, and perceived creativity‐support for creative use of Instagram. Although creativity was not the most central motive for using Instagram, the results from the present study indicated considerable levels of creative use, suggesting that common online spheres are important for everyday creative behavior. Together, this study identified relevant person‐ and platform‐specific factors predicting creative behavior at Instagram, while also highlighting the relevance of creativity in the digital world even outside of devoted digital creativity tools.