Inaugural Issue of CRJ as the Journal of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

It is with considerable excitement that I mark the publication of this inaugural special issue, signifying a new era at Creativity Research Journal: CRJ is now the official journal of The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC). In joining forces, CRJ gains new reach among the SfNC’s global network of scholars, educators, artists, and innovators, and SfNC gains a new platform – built on CRJ’s rich tradition – for disseminating rigorous and thought-leading creativity scholarship. I am also pleased to note the adoption of CRJ’s new cover design, which can be found on the cover of this issue, and which is based on the winning entry to SfNC’s design concept competition (the winner was selected by the votes of SfNC membership). The partnership between CRJ and SfNC has been several years in the making, and it is with gratitude to the many efforts of the SfNC Executive Committee, the SfNC Advisory Board, the CRJ Editorial Board, members of the Taylor & Francis team, and others that I welcome this auspicious beginning. While affiliation with SfNC is an important development for the future of CRJ, this transition does not represent a fundamental change in CRJ’s longstanding mission and scope. CRJ will remain committed to publishing top-notch work that reflects the broad and diverse areas of scholarship that constitute the field of creativity research. Indeed, this breadth of scope is aligned with the broad scope of SfNC. While a core component SfNC’s work is to foster approaches to understandand bolster creative thinking and performance at the neural level, SfNC actively welcomes and supports research accross the spectrum of creativity scholarship. SfNC’s mission engages the arts, industry, and education as well as the sciences, and extends to all influences, contexts, applications, and outcomes of creative processes in individuals, organizations, artificial intelligence, and social systems. This inaugural special issue of CRJ represents the breadth of our field, and the vision of SfNC. The special issue is a remarkable collection of the work of fieldleading scholars and ranges from the development of fundamental theory to notable empirical and methodological advances. The quality and quantity of this work was so strong that it became necessary to publish this inaugural issue in two volumes, one appearing in 2023 and the other in 2024. Many of the papers included In these two volumes operate at the nexus of the theoretical and the empirical. Jonathan Plucker reviews current issues, recent advances, and future directions in creativity assessment, including the need for psychometric quality standards and the use of machine learning. Dean Keith Simonton provides an update on the Blind Variation and Selective Retention Theory of Creativity, emphasizing recent developments and the theory’s research implications. Yoed Kenett, Stacey Humphries, and Anjan Chatterjee discuss the shared psychological and neural mechanisms underlying curiosity, creativity, and aesthetics, highlighting the role of information-seeking and memory systems. Steve Smith and Zsolt Beda challenge the concept of unconscious work in creativity, proposing a testable theory and alternative explanations for incubation effects. Robert Weisberg discusses conflicting theoretical views in creativity studies, examining the remote associates perspective and contrasting it with real-life creative thinking. Keith Holyoak, Nicholas Ichien, and Hongjing Lu explore the role of analogies in the creative thinking process, asserting that distant analogies foster a creative mind-set by enabling novel representations of unfamiliar situations through relational similarities. James Kaufman, Roger Beaty, Yoed Kenett and I introduce the process definition of creativity, defining creativity as a process with core elements (internally-directed attention constrained by a generative goal), as distinct from the descriptors of products (novel and useful) that are the basis of the “standard” definition, then highlighting the alignment of the process definition with neural evidence as well as its capacity to clarify ontological distinctions. Drawing methodological direction from theoretical foundations, Ross Anderson, Ron Beghetto, Vlad Glaveanu, and Marina Basu discuss the limitations of the consensual assessment technique (CAT) in creativity assessment and propose the Divergent, Open-Ended, and Generative (DOG) approach to interpreting creative artifacts. Rex Jung and Dan Hunter call for more imaginative research into CREATIVITY RESEARCH JOURNAL 2023, VOL. 35, NO. 3, 289–290 https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2235201