Neural Mechanisms Of Cognitive Inhibition During Creative Thinking

Creativity is the ability to produce new and unique products or ideas with social value and applicability in a certain social context.As the core component of creativity,creative thinking involves many cognitive processes.As one of the key factors,cognitive inhibition plays an important role in the process of creative thinking.Cognitive inhibition is the ability to suppress the processing or expression of information that would disrupt the efficient completion of the goal at hand.Recently,much of this work within the neuroscience of creativity has focused on the relationship between creative thinking and inhibitory control.Although some studies report that generating creative solutions to a problem requires the inhibition of previous inappropriate ideas inducing fixation phenomena,other studies suggest that inhibitory control hinders creative potential.Therefore,the present study aimed to clarify the potential role of inhibitory control in creative idea generation.According to the resource consumption theory,cognitive inhibition,like all other executive functions,requires limited and easily depleted resources.When an executive function is continuously engaged,it cannot be maintained for a long time.Thus,the first study started from the state of cognitive inhibition,manipulated the cognitive inhibition state of the subjects by manipulating the proportion of incongruent trials in the inhibition conflict task,and divided the subjects into high,medium and low cognitive inhibition state groups.This paper explored the influence of different cognitive inhibition states on creative thinking.The results show that: First,it is effective to study the manipulation of subjects' cognitive inhibition state,that is,to make the subjects in different cognitive inhibition states by completing the conflict task with different proportion of incongruent trials.Second,the subjects with moderate cognitive inhibition are in a relatively flexible transition state between cognitive inhibition and disinhibition,that is,the flexible transition between cognitive inhibition and disinhibition promotes the generation of creative thinking.In addition,the subjects with moderate cognitive inhibition state have obvious right hemisphere effect in the process of creative thinking.Last,there was no significant difference in the performance of the subjects in the three cognitive inhibition states.In the second study,based on the theory of cognitive inhibition of alpha neural oscillation in the process of creative thinking,the state transition of ERS-ERD was used as a neural marker for the flexible transition of cognitive inhibition state in the process of creative thinking.This paper aims to explore the cognitive inhibition processing strategy and its neural mechanism of high and low creativity individuals in the process of creative thinking.It is found that the number of ERSERD conversions of high creative individuals is significantly more than that of low creative individuals when they complete divergent thinking tasks.It further shows that in the process of more creative thinking,the individual cognitive inhibition is not unchangeable,but in a flexible transition between cognitive inhibition and de inhibition according to the requirements of creative tasks and different processing stages.In conclusion,based on the controversial hypothesis between creativity and cognitive inhibition,this study deeply explores the relationship between creativity and cognitive inhibition and its neural mechanism from the overall perspective of the impact of cognitive inhibition on creative thinking and the local perspective of the cognitive neural mechanism of the flexible conversion of cognitive inhibition in the process of creative thinking.The results of behavioral data and neural data show that in the process of creativity generation,the flexible conversion of cognitive inhibition and de inhibition according to the different stages of task demand and processing,and the flexible adjustment of processing strategies of cognitive inhibition control contribute to the generation of individual creative thinking;The control of cognitive inhibition of higher creative thinking level is not stable cognitive inhibition or cognitive disinhibition,but constantly changing according to the nature of the task,processing stage and problem demand,showing a flexible transition between cognitive inhibition and disinhibition.It also demonstrates the dynamic change trend of the cognitive neural mechanism and the neural oscillation mechanism of cognitive inhibition and disinhibition in the process of creative thinking.