Creativity is associated with a characteristic U-shaped function of alpha power changes accompanied by an early increase in functional coupling

Abstract

Although there exists increasing knowledge about brain correlates underlying creative ideation in general, the specific neurocognitive mechanisms implicated in different stages of the creative thinking process are still under-researched. Some recent EEG studies suggested that alpha power during creative ideation varies as a function of time, with the highest levels of alpha power after stimulus onset and at the end of the creative thinking process. The main aim of the present study was to replicate and extend this finding by applying an individual differences approach, and by investigating functional coupling between long distance cortical sites during the process of creative ideation. Eighty-six participants performed the Alternate Uses (AU) task during EEG assessment. Results revealed that more original people showed increased alpha power after stimulus onset and before finalizing the process of idea generation. This U-shaped alpha power pattern was accompanied by an early increase in functional communication between frontal and parietal-occipital sites during the creative thinking process, putatively indicating activation of top-down executive control processes. Participants with lower originality showed no significant time-related variation in alpha power and a delayed increase in long distance functional communication. These findings are in line with dual process models of creative ideation and support the idea that increased alpha power at the beginning of the creative ideation process may indicate more associative modes of thinking and memory processes, while the alpha increases at later stages may indicate executive control processes, associated with idea elaboration/evaluation.

A Fan Effect for Creative Thought: Semantic Richness Facilitates Idea Quantity but Constrains Idea Quality

“…Taken together, the results extend recent work on the dynamics of memory retrieval and cognitive control during creative idea production (Benedek & Fink, 2019;Chrysikou, 2019;Volle, 2018).…”

“…This temporal process, however, does not appear to be constant across individuals (cf. Rominger et al, 2019); for example, Beaty and Silvia (2012) examined individual differences in the serial order effect and found that it interacted with fluid intelligence (Gf): as Gf increased, the serial order effect for originality diminished (see also Hass, 2017). Time was thus less relevant for originality at higher levels of intelligence, suggesting that cognitive control may mitigate early sources of semantic interference.…”

What Does Temporal Brain Signal Complexity Reveal About Verbal Creativity?

“…For example, Ueno et al (2015) found that more creative elderly individuals exhibited higher MSE measured in resting-state EEG. To our best knowledge, only the study by Rominger et al (2019) examined creative idea production as reflected in EEG signals during a creative task (figural DT) and showed increased functional coupling of brain networks from idea generation to idea elaboration. Complementing these previous studies, the present study is a further step toward an elaborated neural complexity theory of creativity.…”

A tEEG framework for studying designer’s cognitive and affective states

“…Specifically, alpha synchronization was widely associated with idea evaluation (Hao et al, 2016), divergent thinking (Fink et al, 2006) and fixation overcoming (Camarda et al, 2018). The time-course research indicated that alpha power increases at the later stages of the creative ideation (Schwab et al, 2014;Rominger et al, 2019), which seems like a U-shaped pattern. However, alpha synchronization is in contradiction with visual creativity.…”