The Shared Cognitive And Neural Mechanism Of Domain-general And Visual Art Creativity

Domain-general and domain-specific view of creativity has long been the heated argument in this field.Domain-general view holds that a general creative ability is the prerequisite to display any creativity in any field.While domain-specific view argues that creative ability exists in and only in the specific area,and creativity from one area is not transferrable to another field.Researchers in recent years have come up some middle-ground models which suggest that creativity can be both domaingeneral and domain-specific.These models or views support that there’s a shared creative cognitive ability underlying every creativity domain,and this shared ability interplays with domain-specific knowledge and skills to help display creativity in a certain domain and output creative product.Accumulating evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggests that domain-general and domain specific creativity are not independent of each other.Regarding behavioral study,research focused mainly on divergent thinking as the domain-general proxy and left out other possible creative cognitive abilities,like convergent thinking and semantic association.On the other hand,regarding the neural mechanisms,a sparse amount is known about the relationship between the activation patterns of domain-general and –specific creativity,much less the direct evidence of the two’s mutual effect.We aim to fill this void by investigating the cognitive and neural correlates between the domaingeneral and –specific creativity,and providing empirical evidence for the neutral models’ view.Visual art creativity,as one of the most investigated fields in domain-specific creativity,involves in generating novel,useful and aesthetic artistic product by using the skills in the visual art domain.The present research starts from the domain-general and –specific creativity view,using two investigations to dissociate the cognitive and neural relationship respectively between domain-general and visual art creativity.Adopting a multi-variate statistical modelling method,investigation 1 clarified the association between domain-general creativity and visual art creativity.Domain-general creativity was measured by five classic task,including product improvement task(PIT),alternative uses task(AUT),novel metaphor task(NMT),remote associates test(RAT),and analogical reasoning task(ART).Visual art creativity was measured by a creative drawing task in which three expert judges rated technical proficiency(TP)and visual creativity(VC)respectively.Structural equation model demonstrated that general creativity(Gc)factor can significantly predict VC while no effect on TP(Model 1).To further explore the different creative thinking factors(e.g.,divergent thinking and convergent thinking)influence on VC,bi-factor model showed that divergent thinking factor directly relates to VC.The impact of convergent thinking on VC is more subtle.Our mediation model suggests that convergent thinking factor influence VC via TP.In general,investigation 1 showed that domain-general creativity can significantly predict visual creativity.Investigation 2 recruited f MRI method to tap into the shared activation patterns and links between domain-general and visual art creativity.AUT was found to be the most prominent contributing factor in the last investigation,this present investigation selected AUT as the proxy of domain-general creativity.Twenty-five participants from the college of fine arts have completed AUT and creative drawing task(CDT)inside a scanner.The results from conjunction analysis and activation similarity analysis revealed that the shared activations displayed on default mode network(DMN,medial superior frontal gyrus),executive control network(ECN,middle frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule)and salient network(SN,dorsal anterior cingulum).These findings are well in accordance with the prior studies,suggesting that brain networks working dynamically together to support different stages in creative activity.In specific,DMN in charge of bottom-up spontaneous association thoughts and integrate prior knowledge and experience to construct novel creative ideas,while ECN exert topdown control over attention to evaluate and select candidate ideas generated previously,and SN is responsible for mediate the switching process between DMN and ECN.Interestingly,caudate nucleus was also found in this shared activation.Caudate nucleus is a core hub in reward system which engages in motivation,reward expectancy,positively-valenced emotions and other cognitive process.The present study assume that reward system is associated with the experienced positive feeling when novel ideas were appeared during the task.Based on the results form investigation 2,the stepwise multiple regression was used to examine whether the activation pattern from AUT in the co-activated brain regions can predict individuals’ visual creativity performance.To insure the regions included in this model have high activation similarity,we conducted activation similarity analysis on group-level and on subject-level respectively.Regions displayed significant similarity on both levels were incorporated,including opercular part of left inferior frontal gyrus(IFG),orbital part of IFG,triangular part of IFG,dorsal anterior cingulum,left middle frontal gyrus,medial superior frontal gyrus and supplemental motor area.Results showed that activation pattern on AUT in opercular part of IFG can predict visual creativity,while activation pattern on CDT in no regions can predict AUT performance.This finding may indicate that opercular part of IFG by interplaying with DMN retrieve and process related semantic information and inhibit unwanted interference to support the creative process.The influence of these domain-general creative cognitive ability on visual creativity was expressed by the involvement of opercular part of IFG.Taken together,this research first reveled the subtle relationship between domain-general and visual art creativity which provided support for the middle-ground views.Secondly,as far as we know,this is the first study investigated the shared neural mechanism of domain-general and visual art creativity,and offered some proof of domain-general creativity contributing on domain-specific creativity from the perspective of neuroimaging.To recap,this research has not only provided empirical evidence for the middle-ground view,but also offered new perspective to dissociate cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying creativity.