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1. Augmenting ideational fluency in a creativity task across multiple transcranial direct current stimulation montages

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-85804-3  

   Chrysikou, Evangelia G. ; Morrow, Hannah M. ; Flohrschutz, Austin ; Denney, Lauryn ( December 2021 , Scientific Reports)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Neuroimaging and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) research has revealed that generating novel ideas is associated with both reductions and increases in prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity, and engagement of posterior occipital cortex, among other regions. However, there is substantial variability in the robustness of these tDCS‐induced effects due to heterogeneous sample sizes, different creativity measures, and methodological diversity in the application of tDCS across laboratories. To address these shortcomings, we used twelve different montages within a standardized tDCS protocol to investigate how altering activity in frontotemporal and occipital cortex impacts creative thinking. Across four experiments, 246 participants generated either the common or an uncommon use for 60 object pictures while undergoing tDCS. Participants also completed a control short-term memory task. We applied active tDCS for 20 min at 1.5 mA through two 5 cm × 5 cm electrodes over left or right ventrolateral prefrontal (areas F7, F8) or occipital (areas O1, O2) cortex, concurrent bilateral stimulation of these regions across polarities, or sham stimulation. Cathodal stimulation of the left, but not right, ventrolateral PFC improved fluency in creative idea generation, but had no effects on originality, as approximated by measures of semantic distance. No effects were obtained for the control tasks. Concurrent bilateral stimulation of the ventrolateral PFC regardless of polarity direction, and excitatory stimulation of occipital cortex did not alter task performance. Highlighting the importance of cross-experimental methodological consistency, these results extend our past findings and contribute to our understanding of the role of left PFC in creative thinking. 

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2. Creative thinking and brain network development in schoolchildren

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13389  

   Duval, Philippe Eon ; Fornari, Eleonora ; Décaillet, Marion ; Ledoux, Jean‐Baptiste ; Beaty, Roger E. ; Denervaud, Solange ( March 2023 , Developmental Science)

   Fostering creative minds has always been a premise to ensure adaptation to new challenges of human civilization. While some alternative educational settings (i.e., Montessori) were shown to nurture creative skills, it is unknown how they impact underlying brain mechanisms across the school years. This study assessed creative thinking and resting‐state functional connectivity via fMRI in 75 children (4–18 y.o.) enrolled either in Montessori or traditional schools. We found that pedagogy significantly influenced creative performance and underlying brain networks. Replicating past work, Montessori‐schooled children showed higher scores on creative thinking tests. Using static functional connectivity analysis, we found that Montessori‐schooled children showed decreased within‐network functional connectivity of the salience network. Moreover, using dynamic functional connectivity, we found that traditionally‐schooled children spent more time in a brain state characterized by high intra‐default mode network connectivity. These findings suggest that pedagogy may influence brain networks relevant to creative thinking—particularly the default and salience networks. Further research is needed, like a longitudinal study, to verify these results given the implications for educational practitioners. A video abstract of this article can be viewed athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWV_5o8wB5g.

   Most executive jobs are prospected to be obsolete within several decades, so creative skills are seen as essential for the near future.

   School experience has been shown to play a role in creativity development, however, the underlying brain mechanisms remained under‐investigated yet.

   Seventy‐five 4–18 years‐old children, from Montessori or traditional schools, performed a creativity task at the behavioral level, and a 6‐min resting‐state MR scan.

   We uniquely report preliminary evidence for the impact of pedagogy on functional brain networks.

    

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3. Diverse functional interaction driven by control-default network hubs supports creative thinking

   https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad356  

   Zhuang, Kaixiang ; Zeitlen, Daniel C. ; Beaty, Roger E. ; Vatansever, Deniz ; Chen, Qunlin ; Qiu, Jiang ( October 2023 , Cerebral Cortex)

   Complex cognitive processes, like creative thinking, rely on interactions among multiple neurocognitive processes to generate effective and innovative behaviors on demand, for which the brain’s connector hubs play a crucial role. However, the unique contribution of specific hub sets to creative thinking is unknown. Employing three functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets (total N = 1,911), we demonstrate that connector hub sets are organized in a hierarchical manner based on diversity, with “control-default hubs”—which combine regions from the frontoparietal control and default mode networks—positioned at the apex. Specifically, control-default hubs exhibit the most diverse resting-state connectivity profiles and play the most substantial role in facilitating interactions between regions with dissimilar neurocognitive functions, a phenomenon we refer to as “diverse functional interaction”. Critically, we found that the involvement of control-default hubs in facilitating diverse functional interaction robustly relates to creativity, explaining both task-induced functional connectivity changes and individual creative performance. Our findings suggest that control-default hubs drive diverse functional interaction in the brain, enabling complex cognition, including creative thinking. We thus uncover a biologically plausible explanation that further elucidates the widely reported contributions of certain frontoparietal control and default mode network regions in creativity studies.

    

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4. AuDrA: An automated drawing assessment platform for evaluating creativity

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02258-3  

   Patterson, John D. ; Barbot, Baptiste ; Lloyd-Cox, James ; Beaty, Roger E. ( November 2023 , Behavior Research Methods)

   The visual modality is central to both reception and expression of human creativity. Creativity assessment paradigms, such as structured drawing tasks Barbot (2018), seek to characterize this key modality of creative ideation. However, visual creativity assessment paradigms often rely on cohorts of expert or naïve raters to gauge the level of creativity of the outputs. This comes at the cost of substantial human investment in both time and labor. To address these issues, recent work has leveraged the power of machine learning techniques to automatically extract creativity scores in the verbal domain (e.g., SemDis; Beaty & Johnson 2021). Yet, a comparably well-vetted solution for the assessment of visual creativity is missing. Here, we introduce AuDrA – an Automated Drawing Assessment platform to extract visual creativity scores from simple drawing productions. Using a collection of line drawings and human creativity ratings, we trained AuDrA and tested its generalizability to untrained drawing sets, raters, and tasks. Across four datasets, nearly 60 raters, and over 13,000 drawings, we found AuDrA scores to be highly correlated with human creativity ratings for new drawings on the same drawing task (r= .65 to .81; mean = .76). Importantly, correlations between AuDrA scores and human raters surpassed those between drawings’ elaboration (i.e., ink on the page) and human creativity raters, suggesting that AuDrA is sensitive to features of drawings beyond simple degree of complexity. We discuss future directions, limitations, and link the trained AuDrA model and a tutorial (https://osf.io/kqn9v/) to enable researchers to efficiently assess new drawings.

    

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5. Population Atlas Analysis of Emerging Brain Structural Connections in the Human Fetus

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jmri.29057  

   Calixto, Camilo ; Machado‐Rivas, Fedel ; Karimi, Davood ; Velasco‐Annis, Clemente ; Cortes‐Albornoz, Maria Camila ; Afacan, Onur ; Warfield, Simon K. ; Gholipour, Ali ; Jaimes, Camilo ( October 2023 , Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging)

   A lack of in utero imaging data hampers our understanding of the connections in the human fetal brain. Generalizing observations from postmortem subjects and premature newborns is inaccurate due to technical and biological differences.

   To evaluate changes in fetal brain structural connectivity between 23 and 35 weeks postconceptional age using a spatiotemporal atlas of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

   Retrospective.

   Publicly available diffusion atlases, based on 60 healthy women (age 18–45 years) with normal prenatal care, from 23 and 35 weeks of gestation.

   3.0 Tesla/DTI acquired with diffusion‐weighted echo planar imaging (EPI).

   We performed whole‐brain fiber tractography from DTI images. The cortical plate of each diffusion atlas was segmented and parcellated into 78 regions derived from the Edinburgh Neonatal Atlas (ENA33). Connectivity matrices were computed, representing normalized fiber connections between nodes. We examined the relationship between global efficiency (GE), local efficiency (LE), small‐worldness (SW), nodal efficiency (NE), and betweenness centrality (BC) with gestational age (GA) and with laterality.

   Linear regression was used to analyze changes in GE, LE, NE, and BC throughout gestation, and to assess changes in laterality. Thet‐tests were used to assess SW.P‐values were corrected using Holm‐Bonferroni method. A correctedP‐value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

   Network analysis revealed a significant weekly increase in GE (5.83%/week, 95% CI 4.32–7.37), LE (5.43%/week, 95% CI 3.63–7.25), and presence of SW across GA. No significant hemisphere differences were found in GE (P = 0.971) or LE (P = 0.458). Increasing GA was significantly associated with increasing NE in 41 nodes, increasing BC in 3 nodes, and decreasing BC in 2 nodes.

   Extensive network development and refinement occur in the second and third trimesters, marked by a rapid increase in global integration and local segregation.

   3

   Stage 2

    

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