Operating in a second language lowers cognitive interference during creative idea generation: Evidence from brain oscillations in bilinguals

Abstract

Tasks measuring human creativity overwhelmingly rely on both language comprehension and production. Although most of the world's population is bilingual, few studies have investigated the effects of language of operation on creative output. This is surprising given that fluent bilinguals master inhibitory control, a mechanism also at play in creative idea evaluation. Here, we compared creative output in the two languages of Polish(L1)-English(L2) bilinguals engaged in a cyclic adaptation of the Alternative Uses Task increasing the contribution of idea evaluation (convergent thinking). We show that Polish-English bilinguals suffer less cognitive interference when generating unusual uses for common objects in the L2 than the L1, without incurring a significant drop in idea originality. Right posterior alpha oscillation power, known to reflect creative thinking, increased over cycles. This effect paralleled the increase in originality ratings over cycles, and lower alpha power (8–10 Hz) was significantly greater in the L1 than the L2. Unexpectedly, we found greater beta (16.5–28 Hz) desynchronization in the L2 than the L1, suggesting that bilingual participants suffered less interference from competing mental representations when performing the task in the L2. Whereas creative output seems unaffected by language of operation overall, the drop in beta power in the L2 suggests that bilinguals are not subjected to the same level of semantic flooding in the second language as they naturally experience in their native language.