The Neural Basis Of Conceptual Expansion And Its Correlation With Personality Trait

Creative cognition, a fundamental ability of human information processing, is the key of the development of human civilization gradually. In the recent years, along with the growing expansion of cognitive neuroscience, it is being the research focus to reveal the neural mechanism of creative cognition. However, creativity cognition is primarily investigated in a unitary neuroscientific perspective, and its neural activity is generally indicated by contrasting creative tasks with common tasks, which is beneficial to reveal creative neural mechanism in general. In fact, creative cognition is consisted of several different cognitive operations. Obviously, the way used above is insufficient to uncover the information processing brain mechanisms by which creative occurs, and there needs a "process" approach to be adopted in this field. The Geneplore model of creativity offered theoretical basis for this. This model characterized four different mental operations that are involved during creative thinking. They are conceptual expansion, insight, overcoming knowledge constraints and creative thinking separately.There we chose conceptual expansion, whose key point lies in expanding concepts’ boundaries to include unusual attributes. In the literatures, one’s ability on conceptual expansion was behaviorally reflected through his reports on the unusual uses of the object actively, or his assessments about the unusualness and the appropriateness of uses or metaphor passively. With such designs above, conceptual expansion operation might be contaminated by the evaluation process heavily. Besides that, creative cognition has close relationship with personal personality factors. To our knowledge, the researches more focused on the investigation of the correlation personality with the brain in resting state, and there is no study to investigate the relationship between personality and brain activity in performing creative tasks. On the technical aspects, the existing studies almost adopted functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fMRI), whose data acquisition is in the closed, narrow and long circumstances which varied heavily with routine life and easily results in emotional disturbance. Furthermore, emotion also has close relationship with creative cognition.Here are 3 experiments and employs functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain activities. fNIRS is an emerging non-invasive imaging technology, whose data acquisition circumstances are similar to personal routine environment. Furthermore, it is sufficient for us to measure relevant brain cortex activities.Experiment 1 aimed to screen the experimental materials of conceptual expansion. The experiment selected "Unusual Uses of the Newspapers Test" to be original materials and asked participants to assess the connection level between uses and newspaper adopting Likert scale. First, the experiment selected 67 uses to be low-expansion group and 71 uses to be high-expansion group according to the assessment. Then, the experiment selected 60 uses from the two groups separately to be conceptual expansion materials and the rest to be practice materials.Experiment 2 aimed to investigate the neural mechanism of conceptual expansion when the evaluation process was controlled. Here, fNIRS was employed to measure prefrontal and temporal activities while participants viewed a use of paper and were instructed to think about the reasonable connection between the use and paper but not to assess the unusualness and the appropriateness of a use for paper. These uses were separated into two groups in Experiment 1 and randomly displayed at the screen. The results found the deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA9) and frontopolar area (FA, BA10) and the activation of temporal regions (BA21/22) when engaging in high expansion as opposed to low expansion.Experiment 3 aimed to investigate the relationship between personality and brain activity in performing creative task. The experiment employed the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Williams creative tendency scale to measure personal personality factor. The experiment computed the correlations of dimensions scores of scales with channels’beta during participants were performing the high-expansion task. The findings reveal that plasticity (openness and extraversion) was positively correlated with FA and right orbitofrontal area activities, imagination and risk-taking were negatively correlated with FA and orbitofrontal cortex activities separately, challenge was positively correlated with FA and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activities.The above results illustrated that conceptual expansion may be orchestrated by the activation of temporal regions versus prefrontal regions. During this process, the temporal regions seem to underlie the formation of new semantic connections and the prefrontal regions seem to underlie the breakout of concepts’boundaries, the selection of rational and effective processing strategies (such as risk-taking strategy) and so on. And, the brain activities above were correlated with personality factors. Furthermore, the brain mechanism of creative cognition was orchestrated by performing tasks versus personality factors.