High And Low Creativity Individual Semantic Distance Processing Differences Research

Creativity becomes a vital ability for individuals and organizations gaining a competitive advantage. A country cannot take initiative position in the process of globalization without support from creative talents. Nowadays, creativity cultivation has already been a concerned issue in the background of quality-oriented education. Focusing on fostering talents' innovative consciousness and creativity has also become an important spirit of deepening the reform of talents development in China.With the evolution of technology and the intersection of psychology and cognitive science, the cognitive progress of creativity gets increasing attentions in different research fields. Individual differences of creativity also attract people to investigate this higher cognitive ability. Semantic processing is a basic factor both in the early and late stages of creative process. Individuals need to find the connection of different concepts whether in logical reasoning or association process. Semantic distance, a concept from semantic memory model, symbolizes the relatedness between concepts and underpins creative performance. Thus, semantic distance plays an important role in the relationship of semantic processing and creativity.This study aims to compare the differences of semantic network characteristic and its automatic spread of activation between highly creative and lowly creative individuals, focusing on the early stage of creative generation. Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking is employed to select highly/lowly creative participants. In experiment 1, participants are requested to rate the semantic distance of highly related, lowly related and unrelated word pairs. In experiment 2, participants fulfill a visual lexical decision task which is composed of 360 trials. Half of the targets are pseudo-words. The prime words of the other half are highly related, lowly related or unrelated to their corresponding targets. Targets and primes are successively presented (SOA=300ms). Participants needs to decide whether the target is real or not. ERPs (Event-Related Potentials) technique is used to collect brain signals and N400 component is taken as an important index.The results suggest shorter semantic distance between the concepts in the semantic network but hypo-activation of lowly related concepts following a meaningful stimulus in highly creative group, whereas lowly creative group shows longer semantic distance but a normal automatic spread of activation. Meanwhile, highly creative group has a more flexible semantic network compared to lowly creative group.