Visual-Spatial and Verbal Remote Association: An fMRI Study

Ching-Lin Wu,Hsueh-Chih Chen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672997

Abstract

Although idea connections at verbal and conceptual levels have been explored by remote associates tests, the visual-spatial level is much less researched. This study investigated the visual-spatial ability via Chinese Radical Remote Associates Test (CRRAT), wherein respondents consider the positions of the stimulus and target Chinese radicals. Chinese Compound Remote Associates Test (CCRAT) questions also feature stimuli of a single Chinese character; therefore, it was adopted for comparison to distinguish the roles played by verbal and visual-spatial associations in a remote associative process. Thirty-six adults responded to CRRAT and CCRAT; their brain activities were analyzed. Upon excluding the influence of age, verbal comprehension, and working memory, it was found that the caudate, posterior cingulate cortex, postcentral gyrus, and medial frontal gyrus were activated when the respondents answered CCRAT, but only the caudate showed significant activation when they answered CRRAT. The Chinese radical remote association minus the Chinese compound remote association showed that the middle frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and precuneus demonstrated significant activation. Therefore, this study demonstrated differences in brain mechanisms between visual-spatial and verbal remote associations.

Highlights

Based on the associative theory of creativity, remote association refers to the ability of one to form new relations with seemingly irrelevant elements (Mednick, 1962)
Chinese radical remote association minus Chinese compound remote association showed that the middle frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe, and precuneus were significantly activated, as shown in Table 3 and Figure 2
This research explored the differences in brain activities from the neural perspective to differentiate verbal and visual-spatial associations, distinguishing the brain mechanisms of different types of remote associations

Summary

Introduction

Based on the associative theory of creativity, remote association refers to the ability of one to form new relations with seemingly irrelevant elements (Mednick, 1962). Those with high remote associative abilities are considered to be able to produce unusual and novel ideas that represent creativity (Wu et al, 2017; Wu, 2019). A RAT question includes three remotely associated English stimuli, and respondents are asked to propose an English word that can pair up with each of the stimuli to create three meaningful expressions. RAT has been widely used in creativity research on different dimensions (Wu et al, 2020). It has been translated into diverse versions in different languages, such as Dutch (Akbari et al, 2012), Japanese (Terai et al, 2013; Orita et al, 2018), Italian (Salvi et al, 2016), and Chinese (Shen et al, 2016; Xiao et al, 2016; Wu and Chen, 2017)

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