The neural coding of creative idea generation across adolescence and early adulthood

Abstract

Creativity is considered key to human prosperity, yet the neurocognitive principles underlying creative performance, and their development, are still poorly understood. To fill this void, we examined the neural correlates of divergent thinking in adults (25–30 years) and adolescents (15–17 years). Participants generated alternative uses (AU) or ordinary characteristics (OC) for common objects while brain activity was assessed using fMRI. Adults outperformed adolescents on the number of solutions for AU and OC trials. Contrasting neural activity for AU with OC trials revealed increased recruitment of left angular gyrus, left supramarginal gyrus, and bilateral middle temporal gyrus in both adults and adolescents. When only trials with multiple AU were included in the analysis, participants showed additional left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)/middle frontal gyrus (MFG) activation for AU compared to OC trials. Correspondingly, individual difference analyses showed a positive correlation between activations for AU relative to OC trials in left IFG/MFG and divergent thinking performance and activations were more pronounced in adults than in adolescents. Taken together, the results of this study demonstrated that creative idea generation involves recruitment of mainly left lateralized parietal and temporal brain regions. Generating multiple creative ideas, a hallmark of divergent thinking, shows additional lateral PFC activation that is not yet optimized in adolescence.

The Relation between Resting State Connectivity and Creativity in Adolescents before and after Training

“…The Main effect AU>OC during the alternative uses task in the scanner (AUT-scanner) at pre-test (n = 32) provided a replication of earlier findings [10].…”

Functional neuroimaging correlates of thinking flexibility and knowledge structure in memory: Exploring the relationships between clinical reasoning and diagnostic thinking

“…Furthermore, the degree of flexibility in thinking requires a variety of strategies to creatively approach a given clinical problem, and, as such, requires a tolerance for ambiguity and a reflective understanding of the practice, both during the clinical-reasoning process (reflection in action) and retrospectively (reflection on action). Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that creative behavior and generation of spontaneous and novel ideas require activation of self-monitoring regions of the medial frontal cortex and a subsequent deactivation of cognitive control regions, such as the lateral frontal cortex (Limb & Braun 2008;Liu et al 2012;Takeuchi et al 2012;Kleibeuker et al 2013;Wiggins & Bhattacharya 2014). Therefore, we would expect deactivation in the lateral frontal regions and activation in the medial frontal regions during analytic reasoning with respect to self-reported flexibility of thinking, consistent with the brain processes reported during spontaneous/creative behavior.…”

Individual differences in verbal creative thinking are reflected in the precuneus

“…Notably, this degree of brain maturation plays a critical role in cognitive development and has different age-related activation (Bunge and Wright, 2007). A recent study also reported that the left lateral PFC was more activated in adults than in adolescents during performing divergent thinking task (Kleibeuker et al, 2013). Although age range of this sample appears to be larger across the adolescence and adult-age of most subjects is between 18 and 21 years-it may bring about unbiased results to discuss particular regions that mature late after adolescence.…”