Rostral and caudal prefrontal contribution to creativity: a meta-analysis of functional imaging data

Abstract

Creativity is of central importance for human civilization, yet its neurocognitive bases are poorly understood. The aim of the present study was to integrate existing functional imaging data by using the meta-analysis approach. We reviewed 34 functional imaging studies that reported activation foci during tasks assumed to engage creative thinking in healthy adults. A coordinate-based meta-analysis using Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) first showed a set of predominantly left-hemispheric regions shared by the various creativity tasks examined. These regions included the caudal lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), the medial and lateral rostral PFC, and the inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortices. Further analyses showed that tasks involving the combination of remote information (combination tasks) activated more anterior areas of the lateral PFC than tasks involving the free generation of unusual responses (unusual generation tasks), although both types of tasks shared caudal prefrontal areas. In addition, verbal and non-verbal tasks involved the same regions in the left caudal prefrontal, temporal, and parietal areas, but also distinct domain-oriented areas. Taken together, these findings suggest that several frontal and parieto-temporal regions may support cognitive processes shared by diverse creativity tasks, and that some regions may be specialized for distinct types of processes. In particular, the lateral PFC appeared to be organized along a rostro-caudal axis, with rostral regions involved in combining ideas creatively and more posterior regions involved in freely generating novel ideas.

Scholarships vs. Training for Happiness Gained from Education in Creativity: An Analytical Model

“…Therefore, these numerical simulations show that improving convergent thinking (see Wu et al, 2014;Yueh et al, 2013) is more important than improving divergent thinking to gain happiness from creativity over the whole life span, (see Alfonso-Benlliure et al, 2013; Davies et al, 2013), once these have both achieved a sufficiently large degree. This is supported by a meta-analysis of functional imaging data performed by Gonen-Yaacovi et al (2013). Note that a value of divergent thinking smaller than its maximum seems to be consistent with happiness arising from psychological solidity and social acceptability: consider, for example, the lack of happiness of individuals who oppose any rule.…”

Neuropsicología del proceso creativo. Un enfoque educativo

“…Entre estos procesos, la fluidez es crítica para las tareas de pensamiento divergente. Concretamente, se ha correlacionado el rendimiento en la fluidez (medida con la prueba de Torrance) con flujo sanguíneo cerebral en el giro frontal inferior en personas sanas (Gonen-Yaacovi et al, 2013). Por su parte, la flexibilidad cognitiva se ha asociado con la unión frontal inferior y la corteza parietal posterior.…”

“…Por su parte, la flexibilidad cognitiva se ha asociado con la unión frontal inferior y la corteza parietal posterior. Específicamente la unión frontal inferior se asocia con procesos ejecutivos y de control que podrían mediar la inhibición de respuestas obvias en las características típicamente creativas como fluidez, flexibilidad u originalidad (Gonen-Yaacovi et al, 2013). También se recalca el papel de la corteza prefrontal, afirmando que aunque estructuras como los ganglios basales suponen un mecanismo que genera de manera constante la novedad (variación), es la corteza prefrontal la que representa, posiblemente en sus áreas dorsolaterales, el mecanismo computacional que convierte la novedad en conductas creativas explícitas (Oliverio, 2008).…”

Deconstructing saccades : identifying the components of saccades that produce saccade-induced retrieval enhancement.

“…found that saccades specifically reduce response times on trials with incongruent flankers. Also, there is activity in these regions during creativity tasks (for review, see Gonen-Yaacovi et al, 2013) similar to the alternate uses task used by Shobe et al (2009) to show that saccades enhanced creativity.…”

“…The inferior parietal lobule is more active during incongruent trials than congruent trials on a cued-flanker task (e.g., Fan et al, 2003) and are also active during creativity tasks (for review, see Gonen-Yaacovi et al, 2013).…”