The Role of Visual Abilities and Cognitive Style in Artistic and Scientific Creativity of Singaporean Secondary School Students

The current research addresses the question of the multidimensional relationship between visual abilities, visual cognitive style, and creativity (artistic and scientific) in Singaporean students of 13-14 years old. Three hundred seventy students (100 students in Study 1 and 270 students in Study 2) from two typical secondary schools in Singapore were administered 10 tasks assessing their visual abilities, visual cognitive style and domain-specific, artistic, and scientific, creativities. Consistent with the results of recent research challenging the foundation of the current assessments of creativity as a general ability, the results of principal component analysis (PCA) (Study 1) and path analysis (Study 2) provided evidence that artistic and scientific types of creativities are clearly dissociable in students of 13-14 years old. Furthermore, the results of both studies demonstrated that although both visual abilities and corresponding cognitive style (object and spatial) reliably predicted artistic and scientific creativity respectively, cognitive style was a reliable predictor of corresponding creativity beyond visual ability. The findings suggest that domain-specific visual creativity begins developing concurrently with corresponding types of visual abilities and cognitive style, and that socio-cultural influences, as reflected by cognitive style, also affect the development of creative performance in a specific domain, beyond abilities.