Visual-Spatial and Verbal Remote Association: An fMRI Study

Abstract

Although idea connections at verbal and conceptual levels have been explored by remote associates tests, the visual-spatial level is much less researched. This study investigated the visual-spatial ability via Chinese Radical Remote Associates Test (CRRAT), wherein respondents consider the positions of the stimulus and target Chinese radicals. Chinese Compound Remote Associates Test (CCRAT) questions also feature stimuli of a single Chinese character; therefore, it was adopted for comparison to distinguish the roles played by verbal and visual-spatial associations in a remote associative process. Thirty-six adults responded to CRRAT and CCRAT; their brain activities were analyzed. Upon excluding the influence of age, verbal comprehension, and working memory, it was found that the caudate, posterior cingulate cortex, postcentral gyrus, and medial frontal gyrus were activated when the respondents answered CCRAT, but only the caudate showed significant activation when they answered CRRAT. The Chinese radical remote association minus the Chinese compound remote association showed that the middle frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and precuneus demonstrated significant activation. Therefore, this study demonstrated differences in brain mechanisms between visual-spatial and verbal remote associations.

Brain Connectivity-based Prediction of Combining Remote Semantic Associates for creative thinking

“…The structural and functional MRI studies consistently demonstrate the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus-a key region of the ECN also involved in semantic control-in such association tasks, (Becker, Kühn, et al, 2020;Becker, Sommer, et al, 2020a;Benedek et al, 2020) and is considered to be critical in retrieving remote associations or link remote concepts (Evans et al, 2020;Krieger-Redwood et al, 2022;Vatansever et al, 2021). In addition, performance in the RAT has been related to higher efficiency of the DMN (Wu & Chen, 2021a, 2021bWu, Tsai, et al, 2020), a network that has been broadly associated with heightened associative abilities (Benedek et al, 2020;Marron et al, 2020;Marron et al, 2018). Finally, performance in the RAT has been related to strong bilateral activation in the insula (Becker, Sommer, et al, 2020b), a key region of the salience network, a network related to orienting and attention to stimuli (Uddin, 2015).…”

“…Only a few studies have so far examined the neural substrates related to associative thinking as assessed with the RAT, and most studies using the RAT-like tasks focused on the insight phenomenon (Wu, Huang, et al, 2020). These studies include structural (Bendetowicz et al, 2017;Tu et al, 2017), task-based (Becker, Kühn, et al, 2020Becker, Sommer, et al, 2020a, 2020bBenedek et al, 2020;Tik et al, 2018;Wu et al, 2021;Wu & Chen, 2021b;Wu, Tsai, et al, 2020) and resting-state (Wu & Chen, 2021a) functional MRI, patient (Bendetowicz et al, 2018) and neural modeling (Kajić et al, 2017) research. The structural and functional MRI studies consistently demonstrate the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus-a key region of the ECN also involved in semantic control-in such association tasks, (Becker, Kühn, et al, 2020;Becker, Sommer, et al, 2020a;Benedek et al, 2020) and is considered to be critical in retrieving remote associations or link remote concepts (Evans et al, 2020;Krieger-Redwood et al, 2022;Vatansever et al, 2021).…”

The involvement of conflict monitoring and rewards processing in the appropriateness evaluation of creativity: An event-related potential-based analysis.

“…For example, Behrens and Olteteanu (2020) found notable behavioral differences in the processing of remote associate tests in different language versions. Furthermore, different brain activations have been observed when performing remote associate tests in various linguistic versions, such as English (Jung-Beeman et al, 2004), Chinese (C. L. Wu & Chen, 2021), and German (Tik et al, 2018). Culture is another important factor that can affect creativity, as demonstrated in numerous studies (Glăveanu, 2019;Niu & Sternberg, 2002;Shao et al, 2019).…”