Wendy Ross

As part of a sustained programme of pedagogical accompaniment with educational technologies, developed in collaboration with our laboratory team, we interviewed a primary school teacher who had par...

Over the past 75 years, psychological science has investigated creativity using established methods. These robust approaches have examined how individuals generate novel thoughts. Such rigor has helped the field shift toward open science, which values robust and reproducible results over novelty alone. Open materials, data, code, preregistration, registered reports, and replication all foster advancement. In 2014, the American Psychological Association (APA) published a special issue that called for greater emphasis on replication in creativity research and promoted stronger initiatives. Despite these efforts, creativity research still lacks a strong culture of replication. This issue likely stems from the fact that creativity research spans many domains and methods. To address this problem, researchers and institutions should prioritize reporting and critically discussing unsuccessful replications in insight problem-solving experiments. Researchers must champion transparent replication and preregistration, and journals should commit to publishing well-conducted failed replications. These steps will drive scientific progress. Robust replication challenges existing paradigms and fosters creativity by confirming findings or revealing new directions.

Frictionless, dematerialised environments (FDEs) are producing a paradox: a rise in cognitive exhaustion and somatic discomfort even as information environments become objectively more efficient. This editorial argues the progressive removal of material, bodily, and social resistance from knowledge environments does not expand cognitive possibility; it forecloses the conditions under which understanding has historically been assembled. What distinguishes the current moment is not merely the pace of change but the nature of the niche: for the first time, the dominant cognitive environment is genuinely immaterial and acquiescent, aligned with the Cartesian fantasy of mind liberated from body rather than with the embodied, situated reality of human cognition. It introduces the concept of the cognitive uncanny valley to account for the somatic discomfort that accompanies AI-generated knowledge. The editorial concludes with a call not for greater cognitive efficiency but for its opposite: the deliberate preservation of inefficiency, impasse, and not-knowing.

Creative cognition research has flourished in recent decades, revealing how extraordinary creative outcomes emerge from ordinary cognitive processes. However, the field faces fragmentation that hinders consensus and integration. This research agenda, developed through a collaborative workshop of 50 European researchers at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, identifies four critical challenges for advancing creative cognition research. Challenge 1 addresses theoretical concerns around defining core research terms like divergent thinking, emotions, and metacognition. Challenge 2 focuses on identifying different types and domains of knowledge that influence creative performance. Challenge 3 emphasizes measuring dynamic interactions between cognitive, affective, and metacognitive processes over time. Challenge 4 calls for incorporating environmental and interpersonal contexts, including collaboration, technology, and embodied cognition. These challenges highlight the need for collaborative approaches to develop standardized measures, synthesize existing findings, and foster methodological innovations. By working together as a research community, we can build more comprehensive theories and effective methods for understanding creativity's cognitive foundations while embracing rather than reducing its inherent complexity.

This article offers a critical analysis of the role of the body in the development of AI in the field of education. It challenges the dominance of symbolic and disembodied AI models based on abstract information processing and advocates for a paradigm shift toward embodied AI grounded in situationality, emergence, and sensorimotor coupling. Drawing on post-cognitivist frameworks, the article highlights the cognitive and experiential limitations of current GenAI systems, such as the loss of proprioception, multimodal agency, and the devaluation of embodied practices. It proposes a redefinition of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) centered on a perceptual–affective choreography. The article advances a more inclusive and emancipatory vision of AI in education, aimed at fostering creative, critical, and situated learning through a set of embodied design principles.

This editorial introduces the special issue on “Expanding Conceptions for Research on Possibility” and surveys the papers submitted by over 15 scholars from diverse fields and disciplinary backgrounds. Expanding our conceptions of research beyond traditional boundaries and silos, the papers in this volume articulate research as a world-disclosing and “world-making” practice, concerned not only with how the “world is” but with creating “a world to come”. Displaying a great variety of research methods and approaches, the articles delineate specific theoretical and methodological strategies for expanding the sense of the Possible in diverse educational and social contexts. The expansion of possibility research and practice is further discussed in relation to theoretical expansions, pedagogical expansions, more-than-human expansions, and possibility and futures thinking. The editorial concludes by highlighting the relevance of possibility research in the context of current global developments.