Use a Spoon as a Spade?: Changes in the Upper and Lower Alpha Bands in Evaluating Alternate Object Use

Abstract

Previous electrophysiological research on human creative cognition has related creative ideation to increased activity in the alpha band, an effect which mainly reflects increased general attentional demands. Research on alpha unrelated to creativity has revealed different functional roles of the upper (semantic processes) and lower (attentional processes) alpha sub-bands. At the same time, the need to dissect creative thinking into specific cognitive operations, such as, semantic processing, re-representation, or conceptual expansion has become evident. The main aim of the reported study was to test whether increased semantic processing demands linked to creating conceptual re-representations of objects required for evaluating alternate uses modulate activity in the upper and/or lower alpha sub-bands. For this purpose, we performed an alternate use evaluation task (AUeT), in which participants saw word pairs representing common uses, alternate uses, and unrelated word pairs, and evaluated whether a given use was common or uncommon (question 1), and how usable it was (question 2). Such an approach allowed us to examine the time-course of semantic processing involved in evaluating alternate uses. Additionally, the results could be contrasted with event-related potential (ERP) studies on creative language and semantic processing. We assumed that demands related to access and integration of semantic information needed to create a re-representation of objects (alternate uses) would be larger than in the case of common uses, which do not require creating a re-representation. This should be reflected in more activity in the alpha band in response to alternate than common uses, which was observed in the analysis of the upper alpha band over parieto-occipital sites. In the lower alpha band, more activity over the left than right anterior sites was observed for alternate uses, which might reflect increased attentional demands. Additionally, in the ERP analysis, alternate uses evoked larger N400 (400–500 ms) amplitudes than common uses, a pattern that extended to later time windows (500–1,000 ms). Overall, the results indicate increased semantic processing demands in alternate use evaluation, possibly linked to the creation of conceptual re-representations.

Metaphors are like lenses: Electrophysiological correlates of novel meaning processing in bilingualism

“…Novel similes, in contrast, converged with literal sentences, both of which elicited more positive amplitudes. Such findings are in line with previous studies on monolingual novel metaphoric meaning comprehension, in which a prolonged negativity was observed in response to novel metaphoric relative to literal meanings, and was interpreted as continuation of the N400 response, reflecting the ongoing difficulty of meaning integration (Tang et al, 2017a(Tang et al, , 2017b or overlapping the LPC amplitudes and indicating a prolonged activation of semantic information in creative language processing (Rataj et al, 2018a(Rataj et al, , 2018b. Alternatively, such sustained negativity might be indicative of an activation of the non-literal route during the comprehension of semantically complex, novel metaphoric meanings (Jankowiak, 2019).…”

How does emotion influence the creativity evaluation of exogenous alternative ideas?

“…Before beginning the experiment, we conducted five practice trials to familiarize the participants with the experimental design. The participants then completed the AUeT [75]. In each trial, they saw a colour image of an object in the centre of the screen, paired with a verbal description of a use related to that object, (at the bottom of the picture of the object).…”

“…We had classified these uses as non-creative (NC; e.g., a bicycle as a means of transport), moderately creative (MC; e.g., a bicycle as a slide), and highly creative (HC; e.g., a bicycle as a chandelier). The participants evaluated these ideas’ creativity on a trial-by-trial basis (see [75] for a similar procedure).…”

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“…При изучении механизмов креативности особый интерес вызывают организация семантического пространства и закономерности такого извлечения информации, которые приводят к новому решению проблемы. В связи с этим задача использования предмета была рассмотрена с альтернативной оценкой «распространенное-необычное» и «пригодное-непригодное» (Rataj et al, 2018). Относительно большая активность теменно-затылочных участков коры правого полушария в высокочастотном альфа-диапазоне и передних отделов левого полушария по сравнению с правым в низкочастотном альфадиапазоне отмечена для альтернативного использования по сравнению с обычным.…”