Body Posture and Divergent Thinking in Sport-Major and Non-Sport-Major University Students: An Embodied Cognition Perspective

Objective: To explore divergent thinking under open and closed seated postures and its association with educational background. Methods: Thirty university students (15 sport-major and 15 non-sport-major students) completed an Alternative Uses Task under both posture conditions. Originality and flexibility were scored with TransDis and analyzed using mixed-design ANOVAs and additional frequentist and Bayesian analyses. All analyses were exploratory. Results: Originality was higher in the closed condition in both groups, F(1, 28) = 111.68, p < .001, partial η2 = 0.800. Sport-major students also showed higher originality overall. The posture × group interaction was nominally significant (p = .031), but the evidence for moderation was not fully convergent across sensitivity, Bayesian, and predictive analyses. Flexibility showed a less conclusive posture contrast (nominal p = .045); neither this term nor the originality interaction survived a six-test multiplicity adjustment. Conclusions: The findings identify a context-specific association between seated posture and semantic-distance originality. The unusually large contrast in this small exploratory sample warrants replication with standardized manipulation checks and fluency metrics.