Event Related Potentials’ Characteristics in the Different Models of Verbal Creative Thinking

Abstract

The comparative study of three different models of creative thinking in unified event-related (ERP) paradigm is presented. The subjects (18–35 years old) performed the following tasks: PROVERBS (a divergent creative task to overcome stereotypes of long-term memory), REMOTE ASSOCIATIONS (a convergent creative task activating remote semantic fields), ALTERNATIVE USES TASK (a divergent creative task with the initiation of the associative search process). In the creative tasks, subjects required to create an original ending to a proverb (Pr), find a word that could be matched with three presented words from different semantic fields (RAT), invent original ways of using common objects (AUT). In the control tasks subjects were required to recall a well-known ending to a proverb (PrM), and to list/name objects from a given category (CAT). The ERP amplitudes were analyzed when comparing the tasks with each other. Greater negativity was observed for the a component with around 300 ms latency (~N300) in frontal regions (280–346 ms after stimuli onset) in the Pr task, which probably reflects inhibition of the patterns of long-term memory. In the Pr and RAT tasks, semantic retrieval and integration of new information versus retrieval of known information from memory (PrM) was characterized by lower amplitude values of late components at the 698–786 ms interval. The greater amplitude of late ERP components in parietal regions (524–624 ms) during divergent thinking (AUT) may correspond to the greater emergence of images in this task compared to more abstract RAT and Pr tasks. Thus, even in the early stages of information processing in verbal creative tasks performance, the specificity of different models of creative thinking appears in the same temporal paradigm and similar visual stimuli presentation.