Neural Correlates of Creative Drawing: Relationship Between EEG Output and a Domain-Specific Creativity Scale

Abstract

AbstractCreativity is defined as the ability to develop novel and effective ideas, artifacts, or solutions. Neural correlates of the Kaufman domains of creativity scale (K-DOCS) have been studied to better understand the neurophysiological representations of specific mental processes. The K-DOCS is a self-report questionnaire that measures five domains of creativity: Everyday, Scholarly, Performance, Science, and Arts. In this study, twenty-two international undergraduate students at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology were first assessed based on the K-DOCS. Subsequently, the participants underwent electroencephalography recordings while solving picture completion problems from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The relative alpha power was calculated for eight channels, and the correlations with the domains of the K-DOCS were analyzed using Spearman’s rank correlation test. The only correlations regarded as significant were negative correlations between both the relative alpha power and the relative slow alpha power (in the temporal, occipital, and parietal sites) and the measures associated with the K-DOCS Performance domain. In particular, the relationship between alpha synchronization in parietal and occipital sites and the suppression of distracting information flows from the visual system, the devotion of cognitive resources to memory search and retrieval, and the outcome of interviews about participants’ experiences while executing a specific task were analyzed. In this regard, the high score in the Performance domain might indicate a tendency to rely on visual inputs rather than memory when searching for ideas during creative tasks. This study contributes to widening the scope of quantitative assessments of creativity.KeywordsCreative drawingEEG alphaK-DOCSDomain-specific creativity scaleNeural correlates of creativity