Prefrontal cortex involvement in creative problem solving in middle adolescence and adulthood

Abstract

Creative cognition, defined as the generation of new yet appropriate ideas and solutions, serves important adaptive purposes. Here, we tested whether and how middle adolescence, characterized by transformations toward life independency and individuality, is a more profitable phase than adulthood for creative cognition. Behavioral and neural differences for creative problem solving in adolescents (15-17 years) and adults (25-30 years) were measured while performing a matchstick problem task (MPT) in the scanner and the creative ability test (CAT), a visuo-spatial divergent thinking task, outside the scanner. Overall performances were comparable, although MPT performance indicated an advantage for adolescents in creative problem solving. In addition, adolescents showed more activation in lateral prefrontal cortex (ventral and dorsal) during creative problem solving compared to adults. These areas correlated with performances on the MPT and the CAT performance. We discuss that extended prefrontal cortex activation in adolescence is important for exploration and aids in creative cognition.

Creativity Development in Adolescence: Insight from Behavior, Brain, and Training Studies

“…Notably, a substantial part of these studies revealed positive relations between PFC activations and creative performance (e.g., Carlsson, Wendt, & Risberg, ; Chavez‐Eakle, Graf‐Guerrero, Garcia‐Reyna, Vaugier, & Cruz‐Fuentes, ; Gibson, Folley, & Park, ). We investigated the neurodevelopmental changes of verbal creative idea generation in adolescents and adults (Kleibeuker et al., ). Based on the behavioral study described earlier, we predicted that adults (25–30 years) would outperform adolescents (15–17 years) on creative idea generation, and indeed, adults generated significantly more alternative uses than adolescents.…”

“…Important new questions triggered by these results are what (brain) mechanisms are underlying training success in adolescents and to what extent training effects are related to the reorganization of the PFC and associated regulatory systems during adolescence (Keating, ; Steinberg, ). To examine these issues, we asked participants aged 15–16 years to perform an adapted version of the AUT (similar to the task described in Kleibeuker et al., ); fMRI images were acquired before and after the training program (Kleibeuker et al., ). Again, the core brain regions for creative ideation (SMG, AG, MTG) were consistently activated in adolescents and recruitment remained relatively stable after training.…”

Blockwise Human Brain Network Visual Comparison Using NodeTrix Representation

“…In recent work [27] [13], scientists found linkage between the pre-frontal lobe and the creative mind and problem solving tendency. We reproduced this discovery by incorporating the optimal ROI clustering into the visualization design.…”

Resisting classical solutions: The creative mind of industrial designers and engineers.

“…The raters displayed a satisfactory intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC = .89). Each participant was then scored on the mean rating of the originality scores of all of the solutions as in (Fink et al 2012;Kleibeuker et al 2013). …”