The Development And Plasticity Of Divergent Thinking And Its Functional Brain Network Basis

Creativity is important for individual development,personnel training,enterprise innovation and even national development.There is still an obvious gap between the current understanding of creativity and the actual needs.The physiological mechanism of creativity,the behavioral pattern of highly creative individuals,the developmental trajectory of creativity,the cultivation of creativity,the effective ways to improve creativity,the stimulation of early creativity,the reform measures of creative education,and the effective policies of the state to support and encourage innovation have attracted the attention of researchers.This study focuses on the important component of creativity: divergent thinking.Cognitive neuroscience studies have shown that large-scale brain networks,such as default networks,control networks and salience networks,play an important role in divergent thinking.In the process of creative cognition,the activity of default network reflects the spontaneous generation of creative ideas.Control networks involve the evaluating the effectiveness of ideas and modifying them to meet specific target.In addition,the dynamic interaction between networks may be related to divergent thinking.Individuals with high divergent thinking ability tend to have more flexible thinking modes.They often have richer and more flexible semantic networks,can build relationships between unrelated things or concepts,and can switch freely between different thinking modes.These abilities enable them to generate original ideas.These explicit behavioral performances may be related to the flexible connectivity patterns of the brain.From childhood to adulthood,children and adolescents have experienced a transition from childhood to maturity.The structure and function of the brain are constantly changing,and various cognitive abilities are rapidly developing and improving.Children and adolescents are the new force of social development in the future.Their creative level is directly related to the long-term development of the country and social progress.It is of great significance to study the development trajectory of divergent thinking and its neural basis.This study explores the development and plasticity of divergent thinking from the perspective of large-scale brain networks.A large number of cognitive neuroscience studies have explored the neural basis of divergent thinking from different perspectives with different methods.However,many problems have been unsolved.Firstly,although many studies have shown that divergent thinking is related to the structure and function of default network,control network and prominent network nodes,as well as the functional connections between nodes,these studies are mostly based on the level of nodes.Studies have shown that explicit behavior is the result of coordinated activity between multiple brain regions.There are many functional networks in the brain,and the activities of brain regions in these functional networks are highly consistent.The role of large-scale brain networks in divergent thinking remains at the level of meta-analysis or theory,and there is little direct evidence on the level of networks.Are brain functional networks involved in the cognitive process of divergent thinking at the network level? Is the collaborative activity between networks related to the cognitive process of divergent thinking? Are networks engagement and collaborative activities specific to the cognitive process of divergent thinking and independent of control conditions? Secondly,previous studies have shown that divergent thinking is related to the functional connections between the nodes in the default network and between the important nodes in the control network and the default network.However,most of these studies use static functional connectivity analysis.Studies have shown that the functional connections of the brain are dynamic.This dynamic fluctuation of the brain is associated with cognitive flexibility and personality such as openness.High creative individuals tend to have richer and more flexible thinking patterns.This behavioral performance may have brain functional basis.Does the functional connectivity of the individual's brain change in a dynamic way? Does the higher the divergent thinking ability one has,the richer and more diverse the functional connections one's brain exhibit? Is the dynamic functional connectivity of key nodes of the default network,control networks and salience network related to divergent thinking? Is dynamic functional connectivity at the network level related to divergent thinking? These questions need to be explored.In addition,the research on the development of divergent thinking of children and adolescents mostly stays at the behavioral level.What is the development trajectory of divergent thinking? Is there any difference in the development trajectory of brain functional connections between high and low divergent thinking individuals? In addition,the study of brain mechanism of divergent thinking development mostly uses cross-sectional data.Studies using longitudinal design are lacking.Divergent thinking is constantly changing.Different individuals may change in different directions.The brain mechanism under this behavioral change remains to be explored.Finally,whether divergent thinking can be improved through external intervention is also a question of concern to researchers.Divergent thinking is affected by many factors.Behavior training can improve the performance of divergent thinking effectively.However,these studies pay more attention to the different methods to improve the performance of divergent thinking and the effectiveness of these methods on behavior level.Whether the improvement of divergent thinking is accompanied with changes in brain activity patterns has received little attention.Four studies and eight experiments were conducted to explore the role of largescale brain networks in the development of divergent thinking and the effect of creative training on the brain functional networks.Study 1 explored the interaction of large-scale brain networks in divergent thinking.Two experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between large-scale brain networks and divergent thinking from two perspectives: task-based cognitive process of divergent thinking and resting-state-based spontaneous brain activity.Data-driven method is used to obtain large-scale brain networks and explore the large-scale brain networks which are involved in the cognitive process of divergent thinking.Then,the relationship between functional connections between networks and cognitive processes of divergent thinking is explored.In addition to static functional connectivity analysis,we introduce dynamic functional connectivity analysis method to explore the relationship between functional connectivity flexibility in large-scale brain networks and divergent thinking from a subtle time scale.Data-driven independent component analysis shows that large-scale brain networks such as default network,control network and salience network are involved in the cognitive process of divergent thinking,and the functional connections between networks are also related to the cognitive process of divergent thinking.In addition,the analysis of dynamic functional connections shows that the dynamic functional connections between the default network and other networks are related to divergent thinking.The higher the level of divergent thinking,the more flexible the brain functional connectivity pattern.Study 1 expands previous studies.On the one hand,data-driven method is used to prove that largescale brain networks and their interactions are involved in the cognitive process of divergent thinking,and on the other hand,the flexibility of dynamic functional connections between brain networks is related to divergent thinking.In study 2,age was used as a continuous variable to investigate the developmental trajectory of divergent thinking and its brain functional basis.Using static functional connectivity and dynamic functional connectivity as brain indexes,we investigated the relationship between brain functional connectivity patterns and the development of divergent thinking.The results show that the development of divergent thinking shows a non-linear development trajectory.With the increase of age,the divergent thinking rises significantly firstly,peaks and then slowly decreases.Individuals with different levels of divergent thinking have different brain functional connections developmental trajectories.Functional connections among some important nodes of default networks,control networks and salience network are related to the development of divergent thinking.Specifically,the functional connectivity between the medial prefrontal lobe and the lateral prefrontal lobe of high divergent thinking individuals increase with age,while the low divergent thinking individuals decrease with age.Brain dynamic functional connectivity analysis showed that there were significant differences between individuals with high and low divergent thinking in development trajectory of dynamic functional connectivity.The variability of functional connectivity in control networks is related to the development of divergent thinking.With the development of age,the flexibility of individual control network in high divergent thinking group change little,while that in low divergent thinking group has a trend to decrease.The results may indicate that the development of divergent thinking depends on the enhancement of functional interaction between networks and the maintenance of functional flexibility within networks.In study 3,on the basis of study 2,we further use longitudinal tracking data to investigate the predictive effect of brain functional connectivity on the development of divergent thinking.The relationship between functional connectivity or dynamic functional connectivity of the brain at the first time point and the difference of divergent thinking at two time points was investigated after controlling independent variables.The results showed that the variability of brain functional connections can predict the development of divergent thinking.Individuals with high variability are more likely to improve their divergent thinking.This result can help us predict the creative development of children and adolescents according to the functional connectivity of the brain.Study 4 investigates the plasticity effects of divergent thinking training on behavior and brain.Cognitive motivation training was used to train the participants.The participants were given 20 times of training.Before and after the training,the behavior and brain image data of the participants were collected.The results show that training has a plasticity effect on both behavior and brain.The plasticity of the brain is not only reflected in the divergent thinking process,but also in the spontaneous brain activity.Specifically,at the level of behavior,short-term cognitive stimulation training can improve the individual's divergent thinking performance.At the brain level,after training,when performing divergent thinking tasks,the brain activity patterns change significantly.These brain regions are concentrated in the default network,the control network and the salience network.In addition,the functional connections and dynamic characteristics of the brain also change during resting state.The regions also involve in the default network,the control network and the salience network.These results suggest that training individual divergent thinking can influence the brain activity patterns.To sum up,this paper proves the interaction of default network,control network and highlight network in divergent thinking with a series of studies.In addition,this paper further examines the relationship between the development of divergent thinking and these functional networks from the perspective of development.This paper found that the important nodes of these functional networks and their static and dynamic functional connections are related to the development of divergent thinking.Individuals with different divergent thinking levels have different functional network development trajectories.In addition,this paper also uses the training to explore the effect of divergent thinking training on the plasticity of these brain networks.The results show that the activities of the important nodes in these networks are significantly enhanced during the process of divergent thinking.In addition,the functional connections and dynamic characteristics of these important nodes in the resting brain network have also been reshaped.The present study increases the understanding of the relationship between the large brain networks and divergent thinking from the perspective of causality.From the perspective of dynamic and static brain function network interaction,this paper explores the development and plasticity of divergent thinking.This paper not only provides a new perspective for research about divergent thinking neural basis,but also reveals the development trajectory of divergent thinking and the brain function basis.This paper also provides the effective way to improve divergent thinking which is of great importance for educational application.The conclusions of this study can not only help to identify high creative individuals and focus on targeted training,but also help to delineate the critical stage of creative development,so that individuals can give full play to their creativity.In addition,according to the brain basis,low creative individuals can be intervened by targeted cognitive training or nerve stimulation,thereby improving their creativity.