Do our eyes mirror our thought patterns? A study on the influence of convergent and divergent thinking on eye movement.

Research indicates that deliberate thinking and eye movements are related. However, how various thought processes influence eye movements is not explored well. The present research examined the role of convergent and divergent thinking in eye movement. Divergent thinking involves novel alternatives, multiple uses, and unconventional answers which may require scanning visual surroundings precisely and extensively. Hence, it was hypothesized that divergent thinking would involve more scattered and detailed visual scanning than convergent thinking. Two experiments were conducted using repeated measures design: both involved a visual remote association task for convergent thinking and an adapted visual task of the alternate uses task for divergent thinking. Experiment 1 tracked participants' eye movement while solving the task when images of objects were on the screen; whereas, in Experiment 2, the blank screen paradigm was used where the images of items were removed and the eyes were tracked while participants solved the task. Data analysis showed that the eye movements were more object focused during convergent thinking than divergent thinking. The results confirmed that participants in divergent thinking had more detailed and dispersed visual scanning than in convergent thinking.

HGVbaseG2P: a central genetic association database.

The Human Genome Variation database of Genotype to Phenotype information (HGVbaseG2P) is a new central database for summary-level findings produced by human genetic association studies, both large and small. Such a database is needed so that researchers have an easy way to access all the available association study data relevant to their genes, genome regions or diseases of interest. Such a depository will allow true positive signals to be more readily distinguished from false positives (type I error) that fail to consistently replicate. In this paper we describe how HGVbaseG2P has been constructed, and how its data are gathered and organized. We present a range of user-friendly but powerful website tools for searching, browsing and visualizing G2P study findings. HGVbaseG2P is available at http://www.hgvbaseg2p.org.