Classes Of Stimuli Research Articles

Neural Specialization for English and Arabic Print in Early Readers.

Learning to read requires the specialization of a region in the left fusiform gyrus known as the visual word form area (VWFA). This region, which initially responds to faces and objects, develops specificity for print over a long trajectory of instruction and practice. VWFA neurons may be primed for print because of their pre-literate tuning properties, becoming specialized through top-down feedback mechanisms during learning. However, much of what is known about the VWFA comes from studies of Western orthographies, whose alphabets share common visual characteristics. Far less is known about the development of the VWFA for Arabic, which is a complex orthography and is significantly more difficult to achieve fluency in in reading. In the current study, electroencephalography responses were collected from first grade children in the United Arab Emirates learning to read in both English and Arabic. Children viewed words and false font strings in English and Arabic while performing a vigilance task. The P1 and N1 responses to all stimulus categories were quantified in two occipital and two parietal electrodes as well as the alpha band signal across all four electrodes of interest. Analysis revealed a significantly stronger N1 response to English compared to Arabic and decreased alpha power to Arabic compared to English. These findings suggest a fundamental difference in neural plasticity for these two distinct orthographies, even when instruction is concurrent. Future work is needed to determine whether VWFA specialization for Arabic takes longer than more well-studied orthographies and if differences in reading instruction approaches help accelerate this process.

Visual complexity of urban streetscapes: human vs computer vision

Understanding visual complexity of urban environments may improve urban design strategies and limit visual pollution due to advertising, road signage, telecommunication systems and machinery. This paper aims at quantifying visual complexity specifically in urban streetscapes, by submitting a collection of geo-referenced photographs to a group of more than 450 internet users. The average complexity ranking issued from this survey was compared with a set of computer vision predictions, attempting to find the optimal match. Overall, a computer vision indicator matching comprehensively the survey outcome did not clearly emerge from the analysis, but a set of perceptual hypotheses demonstrated that some categories of stimuli are more relevant. The results show how images with contrasting colour regions and sharp edges are more prone to drive the feeling of high complexity.

Greater age‐related cognitive decline in perceptual discrimination of objects than scenes: A cross‐cultural study

AbstractBackgroundAccording to the “PMAT” framework, two distinct cortico‐hippocampal networks – the posterior‐medial (PM) and anterior‐temporal (AT) networks – are involved in the processing of scene and object content respectively (Ranganath & Ritchey, 2012). It has been suggested that aging predominantly affects the AT network (Berron et al., 2018), and recent studies show evidence for early impairment in object relative to scene mnemonic discrimination with age (Reagh et al., 2016; Gusten et al., 2021). Age‐dependent impairments in object discrimination even exist outside the realm of episodic memory tasks, such as in perceptual oddity tasks (Graham et al., 2010). We aim to extend these findings with i) a digital Oddity perceptual discrimination task, and ii) a cross‐cultural sample.MethodWe tested healthy participants in the UK (n = 141) and India (n = 149) aged between 18‐70 years on a novel multi‐category Oddity discrimination task including object and scene categories. Using a combined speed‐accuracy measure, Inverse Efficiency Score (IES), we applied a mixed‐effects modelling approach to analyse the age trajectory of performance across categories.ResultsWe found a significant decline in performance with age across stimulus categories and cultures, and object performance showed a significantly steeper decline than scenes in both cultures.ConclusionThese findings are amongst the first to indicate that the Oddity discrimination task is sensitive and specific to age‐related cognitive decline across cultures. Notably, these findings support the idea that the object/ AT network is more sensitive to age (potentially reflecting tau pathology) than the scene/ PM network (Berron et al., 2020). Therefore, perceptual discrimination tasks may be a promising cross‐cultural assessment tool for the early detection and differential diagnosis of patterns of age‐related cognitive decline.

Are upside-down faces perceived as "less human"?

According to perceptual dehumanization theory (PDT), faces are only perceived as "truly human" when processed in a configural fashion. Consistent with this theory, previous research indicates that when faces are inverted, a manipulation hypothesized to disrupt configural processing, the individuals depicted are attributed fewer uniquely human qualities. In a seminal paper, Hugenberg et al. (2016) reported that faces appeared less creative, less thoughtful, less empathetic, and possessed less "humanness" when inverted. Across four highly powered and preregistered experiments, we demonstrate that inversion does not influence the attribution of uniquely human traits specifically. Rather, in line with research on face processing, inversion impedes face encoding more generally, causing trait attributions to tend toward the mean. Positively valanced faces (i.e., those judged to be trustworthy when presented upright) are perceived to be less creative, considerate, thoughtful, and empathetic when inverted. Conversely, negatively valanced faces (i.e., those judged to be untrustworthy when presented upright) are judged to be more creative, considerate, thoughtful, and empathetic when inverted. Furthermore, we show that the effect of inversion on judgments of "humanness" reflects a general phenomenon that can be replicated with other (nonface) stimulus categories that also possess a canonical orientation. These findings suggest that a key line of evidence for PDT is considerably less convincing than it first appears. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Age‐related and AD pathology‐related differences in neural activation and neural specificity in memory

AbstractBackgroundBeta‐amyloid (Aß) and tau deposition is spatially selective in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), with Aß depositing predominately in posterior‐medial (PM) regions and tau accumulating in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) with increasing age before spreading to anterior‐temporal (AT) regions. Functionally, AT and PM are linked to object and scene processing, respectively, and the hippocampus in the MTL is important for integration and forming associations between objects and scenes. Given the differential vulnerability of AT, PM, and MTL to Aß and tau, we examined the behavioral and neural differences in memory for objects, scenes, and object‐in‐scene pairs between young and cognitively normal older adults with and without AD pathologies.MethodTwenty‐three young (19‐34 yrs) and 32 older (60‐91 yrs) participants completed an incidental encoding task on object, scene, and object‐in‐scene pair images during fMRI and a recognition test outside the scanner (Fig.1). Thirty older participants underwent PiB and FTP PET that measured Aß and tau. We conducted univariate whole‐brain analysis and multi‐voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of AT, PM, and the hippocampus. The MVPA trains a support vector machine to classify the stimulus category (object, scene, pair) based on the ROI’s activation pattern. A higher classification accuracy represents informative neural representation that reflects functional specificity of the region.ResultBehaviorally, older people had worse object (ps<.027) and pair (ps<.017) memory. Greater temporal meta‐ROI tau was related to worse object (p = .032) and pair (p = .022) memory. Whole‐brain analyses showed activations in AT and PM networks for object and scene processing, and additional frontal, temporal, and occipital regions for pair processing (Fig.2A‐C) where older adults, compared to younger adults, showed activation reductions in fusiform, parahippocampal, precuneus, and occipital regions (Fig.2D). The MVPA revealed age‐related reductions in classification accuracy for pairs (Fig.3A) and that greater Aß and tau were related to lower accuracy in the hippocampus (Fig.3B).ConclusionWe found evidence supporting specific vulnerabilities in object and associative memory in older adults correlated with tau pathology. FMRI findings suggest both lower neural activation and lower neural specificity in older adults when processing complex associations. AD pathology appears to contribute to lower neural specificity in the hippocampus.

Dissociative Effects of Age on Neural Differentiation at the Category and Item Levels.

Increasing age is associated with age-related neural dedifferentiation, a reduction in the selectivity of neural representations, which has been proposed to contribute to cognitive decline in older age. Recent findings indicate that when operationalized in terms of selectivity for different perceptual categories, age-related neural dedifferentiation and the apparent age-invariant association of neural selectivity with cognitive performance are largely restricted to the cortical regions typically recruited during scene processing. It is currently unknown whether this category-level dissociation extends to metrics of neural selectivity defined at the level of individual stimulus items. Here, we examined neural selectivity at the category and item levels using multivoxel pattern similarity analysis (PSA) of fMRI data. Healthy young and older male and female adults viewed images of objects and scenes. Some items were presented singly, while others were either repeated or followed by a "similar lure." In agreement with recent findings, category-level PSA revealed robustly lower differentiation in older than in younger adults in scene-selective, but not object-selective, cortical regions. By contrast, at the item level, robust age-related declines in neural differentiation were evident for both stimulus categories. Additionally, we identified an age-invariant association between category-level scene selectivity in the parahippocampal place area and subsequent memory performance, but no such association was evident for item-level metrics. Lastly, category- and item-level neural metrics were uncorrelated. Thus, the present findings suggest that age-related category- and item-level dedifferentiation depend on distinct neural mechanisms.

Information content and temporal structure of face selective local field potentials frequency bands in IT cortex.

Sensory stimulation triggers synchronized bioelectrical activity in the brain across various frequencies. This study delves into network-level activities, specifically focusing on local field potentials as a neural signature of visual category representation. Specifically, we studied the role of different local field potential frequency oscillation bands in visual stimulus category representation by presenting images of faces and objects to three monkeys while recording local field potential from inferior temporal cortex. We found category selective local field potential responses mainly for animate, but not inanimate, objects. Notably, face-selective local field potential responses were evident across all tested frequency bands, manifesting in both enhanced (above mean baseline activity) and suppressed (below mean baseline activity) local field potential powers. We observed four different local field potential response profiles based on frequency bands and face selective excitatory and suppressive responses. Low-frequency local field potential bands (1-30Hz) were more prodominstaly suppressed by face stimulation than the high-frequency (30-170Hz) local field potential bands. Furthermore, the low-frequency local field potentials conveyed less face category informtion than the high-frequency local field potential in both enhansive and suppressive conditions. Furthermore, we observed a negative correlation between face/object d-prime values in all the tested local field potential frequency bands and the anterior-posterior position of the recording sites. In addition, the power of low-frequency local field potential systematically declined across inferior temporal anterior-posterior positions, whereas high-frequency local field potential did not exhibit such a pattern. In general, for most of the above-mentioned findings somewhat similar results were observed for body, but not, other stimulus categories. The observed findings suggest that a balance of face selective excitation and inhibition across time and cortical space shape face category selectivity in inferior temporal cortex.

Dynamics and maintenance of categorical responses in primary auditory cortex during task engagement.

Grouping sets of sounds into relevant categories is an important cognitive ability that enables the association of stimuli with appropriate goal-directed behavioral responses. In perceptual tasks, the primary auditory cortex (A1) assumes a prominent role by concurrently encoding both sound sensory features and task-related variables. Here, we sought to explore the role of A1 in the initiation of sound categorization, shedding light on its involvement in this cognitive process. We trained ferrets to discriminate click trains of different rates in a Go/No-Go delayed categorization task and recorded neural activity during both active behavior and passive exposure to the same sounds. Purely categorical response components were extracted and analyzed separately from sensory responses to reveal their contributions to the overall population response throughout the trials. We found that categorical activity emerged during sound presentation in the population average and was present in both active behavioral and passive states. However, upon task engagement, categorical responses to the No-Go category became suppressed in the population code, leading to an asymmetrical representation of the Go stimuli relative to the No-Go sounds and pre-stimulus baseline. The population code underwent an abrupt change at stimulus offset, with sustained responses after the Go sounds during the delay period. Notably, the categorical responses observed during the stimulus period exhibited a significant correlation with those extracted from the delay epoch, suggesting an early involvement of A1 in stimulus categorization.

Using AI to decode the behavioral responses of an insect to chemical stimuli: towards machine-animal computational technologies

Orthoptera are insects with excellent olfactory sense abilities due to their antennae richly equipped with receptors. This makes them interesting model organisms to be used as biosensors for environmental and agricultural monitoring. Herein, we investigated if the house cricket Acheta domesticus can be used to detect different chemical cues by examining the movements of their antennae and attempting to identify specific antennal displays associated to different chemical cues exposed (e.g., sucrose or ammonia powder). A neural network based on state-of-the-art techniques (i.e., SLEAP) for pose estimation was built to identify the proximal and distal ends of the antennae. The network was optimised via grid search, resulting in a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 83.74%. To classify the stimulus type, another network was employed to take in a series of keypoint sequences, and output the stimulus classification. To find the best one-dimensional convolutional and recurrent neural networks, a genetic algorithm-based optimisation method was used. These networks were validated with iterated K-fold validation, obtaining an average accuracy of 45.33% for the former and 44% for the latter. Notably, we published and introduced the first dataset on cricket recordings that relate this animal’s behaviour to chemical stimuli. Overall, this study proposes a novel and simple automated method that can be extended to other animals for the creation of Biohybrid Intelligent Sensing Systems (e.g., automated video-analysis of an organism’s behaviour) to be exploited in various ecological scenarios.

Recent Progress in Stimuli-Responsive Antimicrobial Electrospun Nanofibers.

Electrospun nanofibrous membranes have garnered significant attention in antimicrobial applications, owing to their intricate three-dimensional network that confers an interconnected porous structure, high specific surface area, and tunable physicochemical properties, as well as their notable capacity for loading and sustained release of antimicrobial agents. Tailoring polymer or hybrid-based nanofibrous membranes with stimuli-responsive characteristics further enhances their versatility, enabling them to exhibit broad-spectrum or specific activity against diverse microorganisms. In this review, we elucidate the pivotal advancements achieved in the realm of stimuli-responsive antimicrobial electrospun nanofibers operating by light, temperature, pH, humidity, and electric field, among others. We provide a concise introduction to the strategies employed to design smart electrospun nanofibers with antimicrobial properties. The core section of our review spotlights recent progress in electrospun nanofiber-based systems triggered by single- and multi-stimuli. Within each stimulus category, we explore recent examples of nanofibers based on different polymers and antimicrobial agents. Finally, we delve into the constraints and future directions of stimuli-responsive nanofibrous materials, paving the way for their wider application spectrum and catalyzing progress toward industrial utilization.

Your place or mine? The neural dynamics of personally familiar scene recognition suggests category independent familiarity encoding.

Recognizing a stimulus as familiar is an important capacity in our everyday life. Recent investigation of visual processes has led to important insights into the nature of the neural representations of familiarity for human faces. Still, little is known about how familiarity affects the neural dynamics of non-face stimulus processing. Here we report the results of an EEG study, examining the representational dynamics of personally familiar scenes. Participants viewed highly variable images of their own apartments and unfamiliar ones, as well as personally familiar and unfamiliar faces. Multivariate pattern analyses were used to examine the time course of differential processing of familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. Time-resolved classification revealed that familiarity is decodable from the EEG data similarly for scenes and faces. The temporal dynamics showed delayed onsets and peaks for scenes as compared to faces. Familiarity information, starting at 200ms, generalized across stimulus categories and led to a robust familiarity effect. In addition, familiarity enhanced category representations in early (250-300ms) and later (>400ms) processing stages. Our results extend previous face familiarity results to another stimulus category and suggest that familiarity as a construct can be understood as a general, stimulus-independent processing step during recognition.

Sound category habituation requires task-relevant attention.

Processing the wealth of sensory information from the surrounding environment is a vital human function with the potential to develop learning, advance social interactions, and promote safety and well-being. To elucidate underlying processes governing these activities we measured neurophysiological responses to patterned stimulus sequences during a sound categorization task to evaluate attention effects on implicit learning, sound categorization, and speech perception. Using a unique experimental design, we uncoupled conceptual categorical effects from stimulus-specific effects by presenting categorical stimulus tokens that did not physically repeat. We found effects of implicit learning, categorical habituation, and a speech perception bias when the sounds were attended, and the listeners performed a categorization task (task-relevant). In contrast, there was no evidence of a speech perception bias, implicit learning of the structured sound sequence, or repetition suppression to repeated within-category sounds (no categorical habituation) when participants passively listened to the sounds and watched a silent closed-captioned video (task-irrelevant). No indication of category perception was demonstrated in the scalp-recorded brain components when participants were watching a movie and had no task with the sounds. These results demonstrate that attention is required to maintain category identification and expectations induced by a structured sequence when the conceptual information must be extracted from stimuli that are acoustically distinct. Taken together, these striking attention effects support the theoretical view that top-down control is required to initiate expectations for higher level cognitive processing.

Temporal dynamics of attitude decisions: A test of the iterative reprocessing model using event-related potentials

Although evaluative judgments are a central component of everyday decision making little is known about the temporal dynamics of the processes used to make them. The present study used the high temporal resolution of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test Cunningham and Zelazo's (2007) posited differences in the timing of attitude tag retrieval relative to stimulus categorization for ‘attitudes’ and ‘evaluations,’ as well as tenets of their Iterative Reprocessing (IR) loop model. Participants made agree/disagree decisions about their attitudes and You/Not You decisions about their autobiographical memories in separate reaction time (RT) tasks while brain activity was recorded from 32 scalp sites. A median-split analysis on RT was used to separate fast and slow decisions. Decisions about autobiographical stimuli produced the typical results in which retrieval and stimulus categorization occurred together just before the response regardless of decision difficulty. By contrast, the relative timing of tag retrieval and categorization differed with difficulty for attitude decisions as predicted by the model. Fast attitude decisions were processed similarly to fast You decisions with retrieval and categorization timing coupled to the response. Slow attitude decisions, however, differed because, while tag retrieval timing was the same as for fast attitude decisions, post-retrieval processing delayed stimulus categorization and a response by 450 msec. ERP activity over dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the pre-response interval was asymmetrical, with greater activity for attitude and autobiographical decisions over left and right hemispheres, respectively, while amplitude and duration increased with decision difficulty for both. Slow attitude decisions alone elicited a reduced pre-response positivity, a correlate of goal-directed response selection. The results provide empirical support for key aspects of Cunningham and Zelazo's (2007) attitude-evaluation dichotomy and the timing of the posited component processes in their IR model as well as novel information about the roles of stored tags and reflective processes in different attitude decisions.

Processing of food stimuli in anorexia nervosa: An ERP-study comparing adolescents and adults.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is associated with altered processing of disorder-relevant stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERP) - such as the Late Positive Potential (LPP) - give information about the underlying mechanisms of central nervous stimulus processing. Patients with AN (22 adolescents, 23 adults) and healthy controls (HCs; 17 adolescents, 24 adults) were included. Neutral, low, and high calorie food-images were rated for valence and arousal; EEG activity was recorded and LPPs (early: 350-700ms; late: 800-1200ms) were extracted. Effects of patient status, age group, and stimulus category were analyzed via mixed 2×2×3-AN(C)OVAs. Patients with AN rated high calorie stimuli lower in valence and higher in arousal than HCs. Controlling for hunger, food stimuli elicited higher early LPPs than neutral ones in patients and HCs. For the late LPP, patients with AN showed larger amplitudes. Results suggest a highly automatic attentional bias towards low-calorie foods. Patients with AN seem to have more intense cognitive processing independent of stimulus material. More research is needed to validate and clarify differences between early and late LPP measures as well as the operationalization and relevance of hunger status.

Prevention focus and conscientiousness drive accurate responding in stimulus detection

Accurate stimulus classification is an important component of decision-making. This study investigated the combined effect of the Five Factor Model with Regulatory Focus personality traits on signal detection in a go/no-go paradigm. Conscientiousness factor analyzed into 2 components: c-perseverance and c-organization. C-perseverance correlated with both prevention and promotion factors while c-organization only correlated with prevention. Prevention predicted both greater sensitivity and slower response speed. C-perseverance was associated with a higher threshold for responding, while c-organization was associated with the reverse. These findings highlight the importance of self-regulation and trait mechanisms in go/no-go classification and may be used to inform recruitment and training techniques for occupations where speeded stimulus discrimination is key, such as for security or threat-detection organizations.

Modality-specific brain representations during automatic processing of face, voice and body expressions.

A central question in affective science and one that is relevant for its clinical applications is how emotions provided by different stimuli are experienced and represented in the brain. Following the traditional view emotional signals are recognized with the help of emotion concepts that are typically used in descriptions of mental states and emotional experiences, irrespective of the sensory modality. This perspective motivated the search for abstract representations of emotions in the brain, shared across variations in stimulus type (face, body, voice) and sensory origin (visual, auditory). On the other hand, emotion signals like for example an aggressive gesture, trigger rapid automatic behavioral responses and this may take place before or independently of full abstract representation of the emotion. This pleads in favor specific emotion signals that may trigger rapid adaptative behavior only by mobilizing modality and stimulus specific brain representations without relying on higher order abstract emotion categories. To test this hypothesis, we presented participants with naturalistic dynamic emotion expressions of the face, the whole body, or the voice in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) study. To focus on automatic emotion processing and sidestep explicit concept-based emotion recognition, participants performed an unrelated target detection task presented in a different sensory modality than the stimulus. By using multivariate analyses to assess neural activity patterns in response to the different stimulus types, we reveal a stimulus category and modality specific brain organization of affective signals. Our findings are consistent with the notion that under ecological conditions emotion expressions of the face, body and voice may have different functional roles in triggering rapid adaptive behavior, even if when viewed from an abstract conceptual vantage point, they may all exemplify the same emotion. This has implications for a neuroethologically grounded emotion research program that should start from detailed behavioral observations of how face, body, and voice expressions function in naturalistic contexts.

The development of visual categorization based on high-level cues.

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation electroencephalographic task. Similar categorization of animal and furniture stimuli emerged in children and adults, with responses much reduced by phase-scrambling (R2 = .34-.73). Categorization was observed from 4 months, but only at 11 months, high-level cues enhanced performance (R2 = .11). Thus, first signs of rapid categorization were evident from 4 months, but similar categorization patterns as in adults were recorded only from 11 months on.

Explicit and implicit category learning in categorical visual search.

Categorical search has been heavily investigated over the past decade, mostly using natural categories that leave the underlying category mental representation unknown. The categorization literature offers several theoretical accounts of category mental representations. One prominent account is that separate learning systems account for classification: an explicit learning system that relies on easily verbalized rules and an implicit learning system that relies on an associatively learned (nonverbalizable) information integration strategy. The current study assessed the contributions of these separate category learning systems in the context of categorical search using simple stimuli. Participants learned to classify sinusoidal grating stimuli according to explicit or implicit categorization strategies, followed by a categorical search task using these same stimulus categories. Computational modeling determined which participants used the appropriate classification strategy during training and search, and eye movements collected during categorical search were assessed. We found that the trained categorization strategies overwhelmingly transferred to the verification (classification response) phase of search. Implicit category learning led to faster search response and shorter target dwell times relative to explicit category learning, consistent with the notion that explicit rule classification relies on a more deliberative response strategy. Participants who transferred the correct category learning strategy to the search guidance phase produced stronger search guidance (defined as the proportion of trials on which the target was the first item fixated) with evidence of greater guidance in implicit-strategy learners. This demonstrates that both implicit and explicit categorization systems contribute to categorical search and produce dissociable patterns of data.

Personal familiarity of faces, animals, objects, and scenes: Distinct perceptual and overlapping conceptual representations

While face, object, and scene recognition are often studied at a basic categorization level (e.g. “a face”, “a car”, “a kitchen”), we frequently recognise individual items of these categories as unique entities (e.g. “my mother”, “my car”, “my kitchen”). This recognition of individual identity is essential to appropriate behaviour in our world. However, relatively little is known about how we recognise individually familiar visual stimuli. Using event-related brain potentials, the present study examined whether and to what extent the underlying neural representations of personally familiar items are similar or different across different categories. In three experiments, we examined the recognition of personally highly familiar faces, animals, indoor scenes, and objects. We observed relatively distinct familiarity effects in an early time window (200-400 ms), with a clearly right-lateralized occipito-temporal scalp distribution for human faces and more bilateral and posterior distributions for other stimulus categories, presumably reflecting access to at least partly discrete visual long-term representations. In contrast, we found clearly overlapping familiarity effects in a later time window (starting 400 to 500 ms after stimulus onset), again with a mainly right occipito-temporal scalp distribution, for all stimulus categories. These later effects appear to reflect the sustained activation of conceptual properties relevant to any potential interaction. We conclude that familiarity for items from the various visual stimulus categories tested here is represented differently at the perceptual level, while relatively overlapping conceptual mechanisms allow for the preparation of impending potential interaction with the environment.

The use of lexical retrieval strategies by creative second language learners: A computational analysis of clustering and switching

This study seeks to delve into the potential role of divergent thinking, a component of creativity, in second language learning. Specifically, we compare the use of lexical organization and production strategies of two groups of more and less creative EFL learners in year 12 through an automatic vectorial semantic analysis of their retrieval in three second language semantic fluency tasks. Consistent with previous research in the field of creativity, our findings indicate that the creative group retrieved more second language words than the less creative group. These words were less related to each other and to the stimulus categories than the words generated by the less creative group. While the creative participants’ retrieval was based on an extensive use of switching, a slight but non-significant trend was found in the production of longer clusters by the less creative participants. These results yield interesting insights into the potential role of creativity in second language learning.