Abstract Concept Improve Creative Analogical Reasoning And Its Brain Mechanisms

Creativity is a mental process refer to generate new ideas and built a novel but meaningful connection among existing concepts. Analogical reasoning is an important tool to evaluate creativity,and it is also a practical means for scientific creation and human invention. To better understand the relationship between analogical reasoning and creativity, scholars have focus on the comparison between conventional analogical reasoning and creative analogical reasoning.Plenty of earlier studies found, compare to traditional analogical reasoning, novel analogical reasoning require people to inhibit relations which is easy retrieve from long-term memory and to built distant relations among items from distinct domains. However, there is no systematical research exploring the novel analogical reasoning through mediate the semantic distance between A and B, C and D.Also, no prior studies have distinguish abstract concepts and concrete concepts in analogical reasoning field. Based on the previous studies, analogy problems with high ecological validity were used as experimental material. This study compare the difference of cognitive process among four different analogy problems,and explores how abstract concepts affects the novel analogical reasoning.In this study, a behavioral experiment was carried out to investigate how abstract concepts affect creative analogy problems in reasoning. We use 2( variable 1: traditional analogical reasoning problems vs non-traditional analogical reasoning problems) * 2(variable 2: concrete concepts vs abstract concepts) within-subject experimental design, which include two independent variables, and four levels totally. The reaction time and accuracy rate of different analogical reasoning tasks of every subjects will be recorded during the experiment. The experimental results show that,participants need more reaction time and lower accuracy rate to completed the creative-concrete analogical reasoning task than the traditional-concrete analogical reasoning task. However, we found an opposite result in the abstract analogical reasoning. Participants need less reaction time and higher accuracy rate to completed the creative-abstract analogical reasoning task than the traditional-abstract analogical reasoning task.In Experiment 2, we used a high spatial discrimination of functional magnetic resonance imaging(f MRI) to examine the brain mechanism of four different analogical reasoning problems.The experimental results show that abstract concepts helps to improve creative thinking because itencourage divergent thinking in analogical mapping process. The f MRI results found creative analogical reasoning is mainly relate to left frontal lobe(BA9, BA46, BA47), inferior parietal lobule,cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, insula and other brain regions. On the other hand, abstract concepts are relate to inferior frontal gyrus, as has been proved in the previous studies. Further t-contrast analysis reveal that BA9, BA46 and BA47 have greater activation when solving the creative analogy problems, this result correspond with the previous researches at home and abroad.We think BA9 and BA46(DLPFC) might be responsible for integration between multi-relationship semantic concepts; while Inferior frontal gyrus(BA47) might be responsible for the break of the mindset and the forming of novel or distant associations. At the same time, inferior parietal lobule may responsible for building semantic connections, while hippocampus may responsible for the formation of novel and effective connection.Combining with the experiments we conclude that, first, abstract concepts can improve the ability of creative analogical reasoning solving; second, the enhanced ability in creative analogical reasoning is associated with enhanced activity in the BA 9, BA46 and BA47. This research for the first time to explore new type creative analogical reasoning and prove abstract concepts can improve the ability of creativity. These findings are of great significance to understand creative thinking and divergent thinking, as well as to foster further study in the field of creativity.