Neurobiological mechanisms for language, symbols and concepts: Clues from brain-constrained deep neural networks

Distinguishing the roles of mental imagery and relational reasoning in creativity: a review and methodological proposal

“…Such variations in associative and executive abilities also corroborate the existence of distinct patterns of imagination (e.g. high frequency of mental imagery and low engagement in conceptual reasoning), as previously reported (Sassenberg et al;2023). In this review, we present experimental evidence and historical examples indicating that variations in mental imagery susceptibility and relational reasoning capacity between people probably result in distinctive patterns of imaginative abilities and, hence, should be separately measured and compared to each other when assessing creativity, as it has been previously suggested by Cotter, Ivcevic & Moeller (2020).…”

“…in a state of total aphantasia and anendophasia). That's why DT tasks are characterized by demanding great levels of associative processing (Beaty & Kennett;2023) and, hence, measuring relational creativity should involve some level of mental imagery demand, otherwise we would basically detect intelligence. In addition to the DT, with its fluency and originality metrics, the two semantic cognitive tasks that most precisely fill in these conditions are free association and analogical reasoning tasks (Table 1), but there may be better options for measuring mental imagery tendencies.…”

“…Before addressing the individual differences in imagination and its possible implications for creativity, it is important to explain the biological basis of associative and executive processes and the types of cognitive processes in which they are involved. The most accepted hypothesis of information storage in the brain postulates that objects and their characteristics are represented by groups of neurons, known as neuronal ensembles (NEs), that are formed by the repeated synchronous activation of these cells, which eventually binds them together (Hebb, 1949(Hebb, /2005Pulvermüller, 2023). Therefore, representations of the world are encoded in distributed networks of features that are considered the neurophysiological basis of imaginative processes (Matsumoto et al, 2021;Pulvermüller, 2013;2023;Vyshedskiy, 2019).…”

“…The most accepted hypothesis of information storage in the brain postulates that objects and their characteristics are represented by groups of neurons, known as neuronal ensembles (NEs), that are formed by the repeated synchronous activation of these cells, which eventually binds them together (Hebb, 1949(Hebb, /2005Pulvermüller, 2023). Therefore, representations of the world are encoded in distributed networks of features that are considered the neurophysiological basis of imaginative processes (Matsumoto et al, 2021;Pulvermüller, 2013;2023;Vyshedskiy, 2019). The activity of these NEs is modulated by both sensory stimulation (i.e., perception) and endogenous processes (i.e., imagination), the latter demanding the same neurobiological mechanism of visual selective attention (i.e., attentional control performed by the lateral prefrontal cortex; Kan & Thompson-Schill, 2004;Pearson, 2019;Vyshedskiy, 2019).…”

“…Imagination can also involve higher-order NEs that encode verbal information, which enables the manipulation of abstract ideas that cannot be represented by perceptual characteristics, such as the words "mammal" and "cycle" (Bais et al, 2017;Matsumoto et al, 2021;Pulvermüller, 2013Pulvermüller, , 2023Pusch et al, 2023). Moreover, verbally oriented cognition can also be distinguished by its level of demand for associative and executive processing (Bais et al, 2017;Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008;Marron et al, 2018;Perrone-Bertolotti et al, 2014).…”