Abstract
We do not know enough about the cognitive background of creativity despite its significance. Using an active oddball paradigm with unambiguous and ambiguous portrait paintings as the standard stimuli, our aim was to examine whether: creativity in the figural domain influences the perception of visual stimuli; any stages of visual processing; or if healthy aging has an effect on these processes. We investigated event related potentials (ERPs) and applied ERP decoding analyses in four groups: younger less creative; younger creative; older less creative; and older creative adults. The early visual processing did not differ between creativity groups. In the later ERP stages the amplitude for the creative compared with the less creative groups was larger between 300 and 500 ms. The stimuli types were clearly distinguishable: within the 300–500 ms range the amplitude was larger for ambiguous rather than unambiguous paintings, but this difference in the traditional ERP analysis was only observable in the younger, not elderly groups, who also had this difference when using decoding analysis. Our results could not prove that visual creativity influences the early stage of perception, but showed creativity had an effect on stimulus processing in the 300–500 ms range, in indexing differences in top-down control, and having more flexible cognitive control in the younger creative group.
Highlights
Creativity, the ability to create novel, original, appropriate and useful ideas or products (Stein, 1953; Runco and Jaeger, 2012), is one of the most important life skills
Our main goal was to reveal whether visual creativity begins with the perception of stimuli, or whether it plays no part in creativity as a cognitive process; as well as, to study whether healthy aging has an effect on these processes
We found that the less-creative groups were slower than the more creative groups (Creativity main effect: F(1,44) = 12.31, p = 0.001, ηp2 = 0.22); but this effect was significant only in the younger group (p = 0.002) according to the post hoc test of the Age x Creativity interaction (F(1,44) = 3.59, p = 0.065, ηp2 = 0.08), not in the older group (p = 0.666)
Summary
Creativity, the ability to create novel, original, appropriate and useful ideas or products (Stein, 1953; Runco and Jaeger, 2012), is one of the most important life skills. We do not know enough about its cognitive background and the neural mechanisms underlying creativity, which are partly the result of issues and limitations from the electrophysiological methods used. These limitations are: strict and unusual laboratory environment; the forbidden movement and speech to eliminate artifacts; Does Creativity Influence Visual Perception?. The time-bound paradigms that require a large number of repetitions; and the time pressure (1–3 min) to complete a task These are all disadvantages which hinder the study of the creative process in cognition, and help to explain why there are so few studies to date examining creative processes using electroencephalography. We chose to compare creative and less creative people to see if they already differ in their early processes, or only later top-down processes cause a difference in their perception, or the perception of stimuli is not different at all
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