Right temporal alpha oscillations as a neural mechanism for inhibiting obvious associations

Abstract

Creative cognition requires mental exploration of remotely connected concepts while suppressing dominant ones. Across four experiments using different samples of participants, we provide evidence that right temporal alpha oscillations play a crucial role in inhibiting habitual thinking modes, thereby paving the way for accessing more remote ideas. In the first experiment, participants completed the compound remote associate task (RAT) in three separate sessions: during right temporal alpha (10 Hz) transcranial alternating current brain stimulation (tACS), left temporal alpha tACS, and sham tACS. Participants performed better under right tACS only on RAT items in which two of the three words shared misleading semantic associations. In the second experiment, we measured EEG while the participants solved RAT items with or without shared misleading associations. We observed an increase in right temporal alpha power when participants correctly solved RAT items with misleading semantic associations. The third experiment demonstrated that while solving divergent thinking tasks participants came up with more remote ideas when stimulated by right temporal alpha tACS. In the fourth experiment, we found that participants showed higher right temporal alpha power when generating more remote uses for common objects. These studies altogether indicate that right temporal alpha oscillations may support creativity by acting as a neural mechanism for an active inhibition of obvious semantic associations.

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

“…This internal focus of attention has a clear neurophysiological signature as evidenced by eye-behavior changes reflecting perceptual decoupling and visual disengagement ( Annerer-Walcher et al, 2018 ), increased electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha activity especially in the frontal and right parietal regions ( Benedek et al, 2014 ), and reduced visual network activity paired with increased right parietal brain activation ( Benedek et al, 2016 ). Increases of EEG alpha activity are a particularly robust finding in creativity research ( Lustenberger et al, 2015 ; Luft et al, 2018 ; Agnoli et al, 2020 ; for reviews, see Fink and Benedek, 2014 ; Stevens and Zabelina, 2019 ), representing inhibition of task-irrelevant (sensory) processing ( Jensen et al, 2012 ; Klimesch, 2012 ), which appears crucial for sustained internally directed activities involving imagination and mental simulation. Indeed, musicians were found to exhibit increased frontal upper alpha-band activity during musical improvisation compared with rote playback ( Lopata et al, 2017 ); in contrast, more accurate learning of new musical structures was associated with lower alpha power, potentially suggesting that less internal focus is necessary when retrieving more automatized procedures ( Zioga et al, 2020 ).…”

Are All Remote Associates Tests Equal? An Overview of the Remote Associates Test in Different Languages

“…Other causes could be, as pointed out by our reviewers, differences in the instructions/explanation of the task, in participants' motivations, in the study setting (e.g., fMRI scanner/EEG, etc. ), in other tasks performed during the same session, and in whether solution feedback was given, and, also, the associations between the items themselves might affect the difficulty (Luft et al, 2018 ).…”

A Systematic Review of Creativity-Related Studies Applying the Remote Associates Test From 2000 to 2019

“…Out of the 172 researches, ten studies explored the remote associative process. These studies mainly focused on how memory affects remote association, such as semantic search, memory retrieval, and prior knowledge (Davelaar, 2015;Klein and Badia, 2015;Kajić et al, 2017), and on aspects of the brain mechanisms underlying the formation of remote associations, such as brain networks, brain structure, brain function, and brain waves (Wu et al, 2016;Bendetowicz et al, 2017Bendetowicz et al, , 2018Di et al, 2018;Pick and Lavidor, 2019;Zhou et al, 2019). In addition, some studies examined the effects of priming on remote association (Sassenberg et al, 2017).…”