Functional brain activation patterns of creative metacognitive monitoring

EEG-based study of design creativity: a review on research design, experiments, and analysis

Brain dynamics associated with design creativity tasks are largely unexplored. Despite significant strides, there is a limited understanding of the brain-behavior during design creation tasks. The objective of this paper is to review the concepts of creativity and design creativity as well as their differences, and to explore the brain dynamics associated with design creativity tasks using electroencephalography (EEG) as a neuroimaging tool. The paper aims to provide essential insights for future researchers in the field of design creativity neurocognition. It seeks to examine fundamental studies, present key findings, and initiate a discussion on associated brain dynamics. The review employs thematic analysis and a forward and backward snowball search methodology with specific inclusion and exclusion criteria to select relevant studies. This search strategy ensured a comprehensive review focused on EEG-based creativity and design creativity experiments. Different components of those experiments such as participants, psychometrics, experiment design, and creativity tasks, are reviewed and then discussed. The review identifies that while some studies have converged on specific findings regarding EEG alpha band activity in creativity experiments, there remain inconsistencies in the literature. The paper underscores the need for further research to unravel the interplays between these cognitive processes. This comprehensive review serves as a valuable resource for readers seeking an understanding of current literature, principal discoveries, and areas where knowledge remains incomplete. It highlights both positive and foundational aspects, identifies gaps, and poses lingering questions to guide future research endeavors.

Exploring How Generating Metaphor Via Insight Versus Analysis Affects Metaphor Quality and Learning Outcomes

Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in which people generate a metaphor, via sudden insight (Aha! moment) or deliberate analysis, influence the quality of generation and subsequent learning outcomes? According to some research, deliberate processing enhances knowledge retention; hence, generation via analysis likely leads to better concept learning. However, other research has shown that solutions generated via insight are better remembered. In the current study, participants were presented with science concepts and descriptions, then generated metaphors for the concepts. They also indicated how they generated each metaphor and rated their metaphor for novelty and aptness. We assessed participants' learning outcomes with a memory test and evaluated the creative quality of the metaphors based on self- and crowd-sourced ratings. Consistent with the deliberate processing benefit, participants became more familiar with the target science concept if they previously generated a metaphor for the concept via analysis compared to via insight. We also found that metaphors generated via analysis did not differ from metaphors generated via insight in quality (aptness or novelty) nor in how well they were remembered. However, participants' self-evaluations of metaphors generated via insight showed more agreement with independent raters, suggesting the role of insight in modulating the creative ideation process. These preliminary findings have implications for understanding the nature of insight during idea generation and its impact on learning.

Creative connections: the neural correlates of semantic relatedness are associated with creativity

The associative theory of creativity proposes that creative ideas result from connecting remotely related concepts in memory. Previous research found that higher creative individuals exhibit a more flexible organization of semantic memory, generate more uncommon word associations, and judge remote concepts as more related. In this study (N = 93), we used fMRI to investigate brain regions involved in judging the relatedness of concepts that vary in their semantic distance, and how such neural involvement relates to individual differences in creativity. Brain regions where activity increased with semantic relatedness mainly overlapped with default, control, salience, semantic control, and multiple demand networks. The default and semantic control networks exhibited increased involvement when evaluating more remote associations. Finally, higher creative people, who provided higher relatedness judgements on average, exhibited lower activity in those regions, possibly reflecting higher neural efficiency. We discuss these findings in the context of the neurocognitive processing underlying creativity. Overall, our findings indicate that judging remote concepts as related reflects a cognitive mechanism underlying creativity and shed light on the neural correlates of this mechanism.

No strong support for a Dunning-Kruger effect in creativity: analyses of self-assessment in absolute and relative terms

Competencies related to the evaluation of own cognitive processes, called metacognitive monitoring, are crucial as they help decide whether to persist in or desist from cognitive efforts. One of the most well-known phenomena in this context-the Dunning-Kruger effect-is that less skilled people tend to overestimate their performance. This effect has been reported for various kinds of performance including creativity. More recently, however, it has been suggested that this phenomenon could be a statistical artifact caused by the better-than-average effect and by regression toward the mean. Therefore, we examined the Dunning-Kruger effect in the context of creative thinking performance (i.e., divergent thinking ability) across two studies (Study 1: N = 425; Study 2: N = 317) and applied the classical quartile-based analysis as well as newly recommended, advanced statistical approaches: the Glejser test of heteroscedasticity and nonlinear quadratic regression. We found that the results indeed depended on the employed statistical method: While classical analyses supported the Dunning-Kruger effect across all conditions, it was not consistently supported by the more advanced statistical methods. These findings are in line with recent work challenging certain assumptions of the Dunning-Kruger effect and we discuss factors that undermine accurate self-assessments, especially in the context of creative performance.

The misjudgment of interoceptive awareness: Systematic overrating of interoceptive awareness among individuals with lower interoceptive metacognitive skills

Knowing when perceiving inner bodily signals better and when perceiving them worse is a health relevant but understudied dimension of interoception. Therefore, the present study assessed interoceptive metacognition (IMC) as the skill to adequately monitor interoceptive accuracy in the cardiac domain. We used the Graz Ambulatory Interoception task (GRAIT), which applied two intervals of the heartbeat tracking task 12 times a day for 3 days in total to n = 66 participants. We assessed IMC as the relative correspondence between interoceptive accuracy and the subjective confidence ratings. We found that 6 % of the total IMC variance was due to person, which was assessed reliable (RKRn=0.81). Furthermore, the between-person variation of IMC was negatively associated with the MAIA (especially attention regulation and self-regulation). People who believe that they are aware of their interoceptive experiences (MAIA) showed lower IMC. This study advocates the assessment of interoception in everyday life.

A systematic framework of creative metacognition

Creative cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for creative performance, relevant work is sparse, which may be partly due to persistent ambiguities in the theoretical conceptualization of creative metacognition. Therefore, this article proposes a systematic framework of creative metacognition (CMC), which builds on recent advancements in metacognition theory and extends them to meet the specifics of creative cognition. The CMC framework consists of two dynamic components-monitoring and control-and a more static component of metacognitive knowledge, each subsuming metacognitive processes applying to the level of task, performance, and responses. We describe the presumed function of these metacognitive components in the creative process, present evidence in support of each, and discuss their association with related constructs, such as creative self-beliefs. We further highlight the dynamic interplay of metacognitive processes across task performance and identify promising avenues for future research.

The Role of Semantic Associations as a Metacognitive Cue in Creative Idea Generation

Is my idea creative? This question directs investing in companies and choosing a research agenda. Following previous research, we focus on the originality of ideas and consider their association with self-assessments of idea generators regarding their own originality. We operationalize the originality score as the frequency (%) of each idea within a sample of participants and originality judgment as the self-assessment of this frequency. Initial evidence suggests that originality scores and originality judgments are produced by separate processes. As a result, originality judgments are prone to biases. So far, heuristic cues that lead to such biases are hardly known. We used methods from computational linguistics to examine the semantic distance as a potential heuristic cue underlying originality judgments. We examined the extent to which the semantic distance would contribute additional explanatory value in predicting originality scores and originality judgments, above and beyond cues known from previous research. In Experiment 1, we re-analyzed previous data that compared originality scores and originality judgments after adding the semantic distance of the generated ideas from the stimuli. We found that the semantic distance contributed to the gap between originality scores and originality judgments. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the examples given in task instructions to prime participants with two levels of idea originality and two levels of semantic distance. We replicated Experiment 1 in finding the semantic distance as a biasing factor for originality judgments. In addition, we found differences among the conditions in the extent of the bias. This study highlights the semantic distance as an unacknowledged metacognitive cue and demonstrates its biasing power for originality judgments.