The study, conducted by Can Cui of Xuzhou Medical University and Northeast Normal University, along with Yiting Long, Chu Zhang, Yuan Yuan, and Yingjie Jiang, tackled a question that has lingered at the edge of creativity science: do reward effects generalize across gain and loss framing? Most prior work has explored how incentives shape creative cognition when people are told they can earn something. Far less attention has been paid to what happens when the same incentive is presented as a threat, something that could slip away if performance falls short. Given that real-world creative work, from scientific grants to artistic commissions, is often framed in terms of what might be lost rather than gained, the gap is more than academic.

To probe this, the team ran two experiments that manipulated two key properties of rewards: whether the money was real or merely hypothetical, and whether the amount was high or low. Participants solved problems under loss framing, meaning the reward was described in terms of potential loss rather than gain. The researchers then compared these new loss-frame results against previously published gain-frame datasets collected with the same tasks and the same reward manipulations, allowing a rare direct look at how framing itself reshapes motivational effects on cognition.

Two distinct creative tasks anchored the investigation. The first was the compound remote associates task, or CRA, a classic measure in which participants must find a single word that links three seemingly unrelated cue words. Solving these problems often involves a flash of insight, a sudden restructuring of how the elements relate. The second was a Chinese character chunk-decomposition task, or CD, in which participants must break apart unfamiliar or ill-structured character configurations into their component strokes or radicals. Crucially, the CD task distinguishes between ordinary decompositions, which rely on familiar radical-level units, and novel decompositions, which require breaking free of learned representations down to the level of individual strokes. This distinction gave the researchers a window into two flavors of creative processing: retrieving known structures versus constructing genuinely new ones.

The results revealed a striking asymmetry between the two tasks. For the CRA task, no interaction involving framing was detected for solution rates, suggesting that whether rewards were framed as gains or losses did not alter how many problems participants solved. However, a reward type by frame interaction did emerge for response times, hinting that framing subtly shifted how quickly people worked, even when their success rates held steady. Insight-driven word problems, it seems, are relatively robust to how the stakes are described.

The chunk-decomposition task told a very different story. Here, the researchers uncovered a significant three-way interaction among reward type, reward magnitude, and framing, driven almost entirely by performance on novel, stroke-level decompositions, the very problems that demand departing from familiar representations. For these novel challenges, the reward pattern differed pronouncedly between the loss-frame sample and the previously collected gain-frame data. In contrast, for ordinary, radical-level decompositions that could be solved with well-practiced perceptual chunks, the framing-related estimate was close to zero. In other words, loss framing selectively rewrote the reward rules only for the most representationally demanding form of creative thinking.

Within the loss-frame sample itself, the pattern of results was counterintuitive. Real rewards of high magnitude produced better performance than either hypothetical high rewards or real low rewards, consistent with the intuition that tangible, substantial incentives motivate effort. Yet the highest overall performance came from the combination of hypothetical rewards and low magnitude, a pairing that on the surface should have been the least motivating. This paradox suggests that under loss framing, the psychological meaning of a reward is not simply a function of its size or reality, but of how these properties interact with the threat context to shape cognitive strategy.

To make sense of the findings, the authors turned to a metacontrol framework, a theoretical account in which cognition continually balances two competing modes: persistence, which stabilizes current representations and drives focused effort, and flexibility, which loosens constraints and permits restructuring. In this view, reward properties act as biases on the persistence-flexibility balance. Real, high-magnitude rewards may push the system toward persistence, which helps with problems requiring sustained application but can hinder the representational upheaval needed for novel decompositions. Hypothetical, low-magnitude rewards, by contrast, may leave the system freer to explore, an advantage precisely when problems demand breaking apart familiar structures. Loss contexts, the researchers propose, may additionally alter how novel representations are processed in the first place, adding a further layer of modulation beyond simple motivational intensity.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. Because the gain-frame and loss-frame data came from independent samples rather than participants tested under both framings, the observed differences cannot be attributed uniquely to framing itself. Sample-level differences in ability, motivation, or strategy could contribute to the cross-sample patterns. Still, the specificity of the effect, confined to novel decompositions and absent from ordinary ones and from CRA solution rates, argues against a generic explanation and lends weight to the idea that framing genuinely interacts with the representational demands of the task.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. Educational settings, workplace innovation programs, and incentive structures of every kind routinely deploy rewards without considering whether they are framed as gains to be won or losses to be avoided. If the findings hold up, the same bonus could enhance routine problem solving while quietly undermining the kind of thinking that produces genuinely original solutions, or vice versa depending on the framing. Motivational framing, the researchers conclude, may be a boundary condition on reward effects in creative problem solving, a factor that determines when incentives help and when they hurt. For anyone designing systems meant to cultivate human creativity, from classrooms to research labs, the message is that how you say it may matter as much as what you offer.

Subject of Research: How loss versus gain framing of rewards modulates creative problem solving performance

Article Title: Loss framing selectively reorganizes reward effects on creative problem solving

Article References: Cui, C., Long, Y., Zhang, C., Yuan, Y., & Jiang, Y. (2026). Loss framing selectively reorganizes reward effects on creative problem solving. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05801-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05801-x

Keywords: creative problem solving, reward, loss framing, gain frame, chunk decomposition, compound remote associates, metacontrol, creativity, cognitive psychology, motivation, insight, BMC Psychology

The graduate at the center of the milestone is Matthew Grundy, a 27-year-old marketing professional who completed the degree ahead of the standard three-year timeframe by taking on additional units and studying through holiday periods. His route through the program offers a case study in how the degree operates in practice. Rather than moving through a fixed sequence of disciplinary prerequisites, Grundy navigated a curriculum built around tackling real-world projects, working alongside people from different backgrounds and exploring emerging technologies and business models. The structure deliberately mirrors the conditions of contemporary professional life, where problems rarely arrive neatly labeled by discipline and where teams are assembled from varied expertise to respond to challenges that shift as quickly as the markets they emerge from.

In remarks following the ceremony, Grundy reflected on what drew him to the program in the first place, describing the degree as different from conventional offerings because it encouraged students to think across industries rather than focusing on a single field of study. He emphasized that the curriculum rewarded creative problem solving and adaptability, and he argued that these capabilities are becoming increasingly important as industries evolve and organizations seek people who can think critically, identify opportunities and navigate uncertainty. His assessment speaks to a wider debate within higher education about whether the traditional degree structure, which has historically organized knowledge into bounded departments and majors, still serves students entering a labor market characterized by fluid career paths, technological disruption and the erosion of clearly defined job descriptions.

Curtin Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne framed the graduation in precisely those terms, saying that Grundy’s success exemplified the curiosity, adaptability and entrepreneurial thinking the university aims to foster in every student. According to Hayne, graduates who can work across disciplines, think creatively and respond confidently to uncertainty will be essential to the future workforce as industries continue to evolve. The statement reflects a strategic bet being made by institutions around the world: that the next generation of value creation, whether in established corporations or startup ecosystems, will depend less on deep specialization in a single domain and more on the ability to synthesize insights from multiple fields, communicate across professional boundaries and translate abstract ideas into practical solutions that generate measurable outcomes.

Grundy’s own experience of the degree suggests that its lessons extended well beyond formal coursework. Balancing full-time work in marketing with a demanding study load, he said the program sparked a strong interest in growth, innovation and business development, and he now plans to continue building a career spanning strategy, marketing, innovation, organizational development and business growth. Notably, he described being the first graduate of the degree as a source of considerable pride, and he offered a perspective on innovation that pushes back against common assumptions. Innovation is frequently equated with technology, he observed, but one of the biggest lessons he took from the degree was that innovation is fundamentally about people, about solving problems and about creating value. Those skills, he argued, will remain important regardless of how industries change in the future.

That people-centered framing of innovation deserves attention, because it aligns with a growing body of thought in management and organizational research. Studies of successful innovation consistently find that technological capability alone rarely determines outcomes; instead, the decisive factors tend to be organizational culture, the willingness to experiment, the capacity to learn from failure and the ability to assemble teams whose members bring complementary perspectives. A degree that explicitly trains students to collaborate across backgrounds and to treat problem solving as a human-centered activity is, in effect, institutionalizing those findings into a curriculum. The implication is that innovation can be taught not as a body of technical knowledge but as a set of habits and dispositions, including tolerance for ambiguity, comfort with iteration and the discipline to test ideas against real constraints before scaling them.

Dr Mike Burbridge, the Bachelor of Innovation course lead at Curtin Business School, described the degree as a direct response to a job market in which career paths are changing faster than ever before. His characterization of the program’s purpose is deliberately practical: the degree, he said, gives students the skills and knowledge to tackle complex problems and the confidence to implement their solutions, whatever direction their careers ultimately take. That last clause is significant. Unlike professional degrees that prepare graduates for a defined occupation, the Bachelor of Innovation is explicitly designed to be destination-agnostic, equipping students with transferable capabilities that remain relevant as their individual paths diverge. In a labor market where analysts estimate that many of today’s school-age students will work in roles that do not yet exist, that design choice represents a conscious departure from the credentialing logic that has dominated universities for generations.

The accelerated completion of the degree also highlights questions about how flexible academic structures can be when students are motivated and institutions allow it. By taking extra units and studying through holiday periods, Grundy compressed a three-year program into a shorter span while simultaneously maintaining full-time employment. For universities, this raises the possibility that innovation-focused curricula, freed from rigid prerequisite chains, may naturally lend themselves to accelerated and part-time pathways alike, broadening access for working professionals who cannot step away from employment to study. It also suggests a model in which the boundary between study and work becomes more porous, with students applying classroom insights to professional challenges in real time and bringing workplace problems back into academic projects, creating a continuous feedback loop between theory and practice.

The graduation arrives amid broader evidence that employers increasingly prize exactly the competencies the program targets. Global surveys of hiring managers routinely place creative thinking, adaptability, complex problem solving and collaboration near the top of desired skills, often ahead of specific technical proficiencies that become obsolete within a few years. Automation and artificial intelligence are expected to absorb many routine analytical tasks, leaving human workers to concentrate on the ambiguous, judgment-heavy and interpersonal dimensions of work that resist codification. A curriculum that treats uncertainty as a subject of study rather than an inconvenience therefore positions its graduates to occupy the segments of the labor market that are likely to expand rather than contract, and the first completed cycle of the degree offers an early indication that students can emerge from such a program with a coherent professional identity rather than a diffuse set of interests.

For Curtin University, the weekend ceremony closes the loop on a bold curricular experiment and opens a new chapter in which the degree must demonstrate sustained value through the career trajectories of its graduates. Grundy’s stated ambition to build a career across strategy, marketing, innovation and business growth will be watched with interest, not as a single data point but as the first entry in what both the university and its faculty clearly hope will become a growing roster of alumni demonstrating that thinking differently can be formally taught, rigorously assessed and practically rewarded. As Professor Hayne’s remarks made clear, the university’s wager is that curiosity, adaptability and entrepreneurial thinking are not fixed traits that students either possess or lack, but capacities that can be deliberately cultivated. The first graduate of the Bachelor of Innovation now stands as living evidence that the experiment can work, and his journey from enrolment to graduation, compressed ahead of schedule and balanced against full-time work, may well become the template that future cohorts of cross-disciplinary problem solvers follow into a workforce that increasingly rewards those who can adapt faster than the world around them changes.

Subject of Research: The first graduate of Curtin University's cross-disciplinary Bachelor of Innovation degree and the design of innovation-focused higher education curricula.

Article Title: Curtin's first Innovation graduate proves the value of thinking differently

Article References: Curtin's first Innovation graduate proves the value of thinking differently. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Curtin University, Bachelor of Innovation, Matthew Grundy, Harlene Hayne, Mike Burbridge, Curtin Business School, innovation education, cross-disciplinary learning, graduate employment, creative problem solving, future workforce, higher education