This study investigated the development of divergent thinking (DT) in early childhood. We followed 107 4-year-olds for 1.5 years. Children's DT was assessed with the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) every 6 months, four times in total. Within the AUT, children were asked to generate unusual uses of common objects while explaining how they came up with…

Previous studies found that bodily states have an impact on divergent thinking, but it remains to be seen how generalizable this effect could be, how exactly it depends on cognitive control, and whether similar effects can be found on convergent thinking. To address these questions, we examined the bodily state effect on divergent thinking,…

Studies suggest that internally oriented cognitive processes are central to creativity. Here, we distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of mind wandering and explore their behavioral and neural correlates. We used a sample of 155 healthy adults from the mind-brain-body dataset, all of whom completed resting-state fMRI scans and…

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research,…

Fluency confound (FC) has been a widely studied issue in divergent thinking (DT) tasks. In this study, the impact of DT task structure on FC was examined by focusing on activity level data from Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)-Figural. The TTCT-Figural involves two different task structures. Prompts in Activities 1 and 2 are designed for…

Associative thinking plays a major role in creativity, as it involves the ability to link distant concepts. Yet, the neural mechanisms allowing to combine distant associates in creative thinking tasks remain poorly understood. We investigated the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns related to combining remote associations for creative…

Accounts of embodied cognition suggest that environmental scene and motor information can be used in a type of neural simulation when generating creative uses for manipulable objects. A scarce amount of studies suggests that the state of the body and environment play a role in people's ability to devise creative uses for objects. In this…

Why can some people generate outstanding creative ideas despite receiving frustrating feedback? Although previous studies highlighted the effects of emotional states on creativity, the interactions between specific psychophysiological emotional parameters or affective states and response inhibition (RI) on creativity remain elusive. Therefore,…

An underexplored aspect of the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity is its phenomenology; in particular, the notion that analogical reasoning is related to insight and its associated "aha!" experience. However, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly investigated. We adapted a set of verbal…

Trait emotional intelligence and evoked empathy may help in a task where emotion-evoking source material is utilized to ideate solutions and services for the end-user. Participants of the current study read life stories of different persons, with perspective-taking instruction to evoke either high or low empathy. The reading was followed with…

The aim of the present study was to examine how social evaluation influences creative idea generation, and whether this effect develops with age. To do so, early adolescents, middle adolescents, and late adolescents performed a creative task either alone or under the supervision of an adult examiner. Three major findings emerged: 1) the social…

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

The present study aimed to explore the neural-related mechanism of the creative evaluation process in individual with different levels of creativity. The time course of evaluation process for creative objects was monitored by event-related potentials (EPRs). Forty-five participants were divided into the high-creativity performance (HCP) group and…

Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance -- including positive correlations with human creativity ratings -- additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including…

Research on creativity is a field of great relevance since it studies our capacity to create, the root of all innovation and problem solving. Some factors, like personality, motivation and artistic knowledge, are known to influence creativity. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of music expertise and gender on creativity and…