In creativity, the importance of interaction with the environment through bodily movement and perceptual information acquired therein has been discussed anecdotally. However, past creativity studies have mainly focused on the connection of creativity with memory and knowledge and the relationship between creativity and cognitive manipulations. The above process of bodily movement and environment was not sufficiently discussed. In this study, we developed a model of the above process and partially checked its validity through an experiment. Our model and the results of our experiment suggested the following processes. The interaction with the environment through the bodily movement changes the content and quality of the ideas generated. That interaction also changes the content of the cognitive manipulations in the idea generation. The above change in the cognitive manipulations partially described the change in the content and quality of the ideas. In these processes, the acquisition of perceptual information that differs greatly from the prediction has an important function. The dynamical relationship between the bodily movement, perception, and cognition in creative activities will require further investigation.

Recently, the close connection between action and creativity has been gaining attention. However, studies investigating how the body influences creativity are limited. This study proposed the framework for that mechanism called Perception and Action-based Imagination based on studies of creativity and embodied cognition. It suggests that creation proceeds through the cycle of imagination generation based on perceptual information and the acquisition of rich perceptual information through imagination implementation. We conducted an experiment to investigate its validity. We prepared the following three conditions: the participants designed the toy with manipulation of the parts 1) by their bodies. 2) in their mind while seeing the parts. 3) in their mind without seeing the parts. Results showed that in the first condition, high creativity evaluations were obtained, the participants paid more attention to the possibility of part fabrication, and the above condition’s effect was partially explained by the focus of part fabrication.

Latin American dancing relies heavily on Cuban Motion (CM) to captivate audiences with its powerful, enchanting, and beautiful expressions. We researched how skilled dancers' CM movements influence audience perceptions. We compared CM movement and evaluations between different skill levels. From previous research, we hypothesize that expert's CM is symmetrical and involves whole-body coordination. Result showed that the heel and other body parts were coordinated in the R-L direction and that the hip trajectory in the horizontal plane was highly circular. However, contrary to the hypothesis, the symmetrical feature of the CM's hip trajectories of experts was divided into two groups: symmetrical / asymmetrical expert. In the evaluation results, the symmetrical group was evaluated higher for factor of Aesthetics and Dynamism, while the asymmetrical group was lower.

This study investigated the longitudinal process of practice by an expert dancer in breakdance. We examined the ability of the concept of “deliberate practice” (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993) to provide a full account of the practice process of an expert dancer. We conducted a fieldwork study to observe the practice of expert dancers under natural conditions, and analyzed data gathered from video and interviews for the progress of a dancer’s proficiency at a particular skill with respect to the following three points: number of rotations in the skill, contents of the skill, and purposes of the skill practices. Results indicated that the practice process involved not only refining the quality of the skill, but also two other activities: the exploration of new and original skills utilizing the characteristics of that skill, and choreographing that skill so that it could fit into his full performance. The practice process of experts is a complicated and creative one, which cannot be sufficiently explained by the concept of “deliberate practice” alone

We investigated the influence of visual information on interpersonal coordination of head- and body- movement during dyadic conversations. Visual information was manipulated by locating a partition at a halfway point between participants. Interpersonal coordination dynamics between head- and body- movement was also compared. To quantify the amount of such movement, human pose estimation software was used. The time series of each body part were submitted to the cross-recurrence quantification analysis to assess the degree of coordination. We hypothesized that unavailability of visual information increase interpersonal bodily coordination and experimental manipulation affects interpersonal coordination during conversation but does differently between head- and body- movement levels. As predicted, results revealed that occlusion of visual information increased head-movement coordination between participants while no significant difference was found in body-movement coordination between conditions. Further investigations on the mechanism of such different influences of perceptual information on coordination dynamics at multiple levels should be pursued.

This study develops a cognitive model to explain the processof artistic creation in a dance domain. Many researchers in thefield of psychology and cognitive science have investigatedthe process of creativity and developed various theories thatexplain this process. Their efforts have mostly focused onhigher cognitive functions of artists and scientists. However,in recent years, several studies that have highlighted theimportance of the interaction between idea generation andidea externalization processes suggest that people can findand develop new aspects of images and ideas by perceivingand reflecting on the images and ideas they externalize. Thisstudy develops a cognitive model that explains this interactionprocess in dance creation by referring to a famous theory ofmotor learning, the closed-loop model. We also investigatedance creation of an expert breakdancer and check thevalidity of our proposed model.

Recently, cognitive science researchers have revealed that human cognition involves the body and is a kind of self- organization phenomenon emerging from dynamic interaction across body-brain-environment. Some of the data obtained from such cognitive, behavioral, or physiological activities are often complicated in terms of non-stationarity and nonlinearity. Researchers have proposed several analytical tools and frameworks. Recurrence analysis is one of the nonlinear data analyses developed in nonlinear dynamics. It has been applied to various research fields, including cognitive science, for language (categorical) data or motion (continuous) data. However, most previous studies have applied recurrence methods individually to categorical or continuous data. We aimed to integrate these methods to investigate the relationship between speech (categorical) and motion (continuous) directly. To do so, we added temporal information (a time stamp) to categorical data and applied the joint recurrence analysis methods to visualize and quantify speech-motion coordination during a rap performance. Our pilot study suggested the possibility of visualizing and quantifying it.

In this study, we investigated the reinterpretation process of a non-art object. It is often said that a unique perspectivedifferent from daily life arises in the cognitive process of an art activity. We assumed that such a unique viewpoint canalso be applied to non-art objects and people will discover new aspects of objects and/or their own viewpoints throughthe reinterpretation of non-art objects. We conducted a between-subjects experiment to investigate the process in detail.We expected the artistic context of the participant to influence the interpretation. We conducted two types of interventionsto manipulate participants artistic context. The result of the experiment suggests that the artistic context influenced theinterpretation process of non-art objects.

This study investigated heart rate synchronization (synchronized arousal) between performers and audience in a real-life dance battle. Although similar phenomena have been observed in some rituals, no studies have been conducted on art performances, such as dance and music. We organized a dance battle and measured the heart rate of both the dancers and the audience during the actual performance. The degree of heart rate synchronization was calculated using cross-recurrence plot/cross-recurrence quantification analysis. The results show that 1) heart rate synchronization between the dancers and audience does occur in dance battles, 2) the degree of heart rate synchronization varies depending on the social relationship between the dancers and audience, and 3) the degree of heart rate synchronization dynamically changes as the performance progresses. These findings suggest that embodied, physiological, and social aspects are involved in the process of performance sharing and appreciation.