The role of the pause in creative thinking
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture "The role of the pause in creative thinking". The lecture will be delivered by Nadezhda Moroshkina, Candidate of Psychology and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cognitive Studies, St Petersburg University.
When tackling a complex creative task, we sometimes get stumped and pause, putting it off until later. Some famous inventors and scholars have noticed that it is during the pause that the right idea suddenly comes to them. But do such pauses really help with creative thinking, and how long should they last?
In psychology, the preparation of a solution during a period of relative peace is commonly referred to as the incubation effect. Incubation contributes to finding a solution despite the absence of a conscious search for it. During this lecture, we will review scientific research into incubation and its possible explanations. We will discuss how to make incubation as useful as possible. We will also consider the difference between incubation and procrastination, which is considered a desire to put off important things for later. Does procrastination have negative consequences, or should it be seen as a creative pause?
Nadezhda Moroshkina
From 2006 to 2018, she taught at the Faculty of Psychology and at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St Petersburg University. Since 2018, she has been a senior research associate at the Institute for Cognitive Studies. Her research interests include: experimental studies of creative thinking; implicit learning and memory; metacognitions; and cognitive illusions. She is the author of courses in cognitive and experimental psychology and co-author of the online course "Psychology of Consciousness" on the OpenEdu and Coursera platforms.
Nadezhda Moroshkina is a regular participant in international and Russian research conferences, schools and symposia, including: the Congress of the Russian Psychological Society; the International Conference on Cognitive Science; and the St Petersburg University Winter Psychological School to name just a few. She is a member of the Programme Committee of the conference "Cognitive Science in Moscow: New Research" (2017, 2019, 2021), and a member of the editorial board of the journal "Psychological Studies" and the "Russian Journal of Cognitive Science". She is the author of more than one hundred scholarly publications on cognitive psychology and research methods.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.