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A Matter of Relevance: fMRI Evidence for Autobiographical Retrieval in Creative Cognition
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Katalin Havas1, Lara von Dombrowski, Valentina Alimenti, Bedia Vidua, Martin Wegrzyn, Johanna Kissler; 1Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, 2CRC Linguistic Creativity in Communication, 3Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology
In the domain of language, the creative process of generating new and effective ideas requires the flexible integration of elements from different memory systems and lexical representations. Previous research has primarily focused on semantic memory, working memory, and associative networks, whereas the contribution of episodic and autobiographical memory has received comparatively little attention. Recent behavioral and neuro-imaging findings suggest that creative ideation recruits neural systems associated with autobiographical memory, and that access to episodic memories may facilitate creative performance. Verbal fluency (VF) tasks provide a useful paradigm for studying flexible memory search because they can engage multiple retrieval processes simultaneously. During VF tasks (e.g. naming as many “animals” as possible within one minute), generated words may be linked through semantic associations (e.g. farm animals), phonological similarities (e.g. words that rhyme), or autobiographical relevance (e.g. pets from childhood). While semantic and phonological information can be assessed using computational measures, autobiographical associations are more difficult to capture reliably, as they are specific to each speaker. In a behavioral study, sixty-six participants completed four semantic VF tasks alongside the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), a widely used measure of creativity. Participants were subsequently interviewed regarding the personal relevance of the words they had produced. Participants who generated a greater number of words with subjective personal relevance during the VF tasks achieved higher AUT scores (r = 0.451, p = 0.0031), suggesting a relationship between autobiographical retrieval processes and creative cognition. To explore this relationship in greater depth, we are currently conducting a second study using fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of personally relevant lexical retrieval and their association with creativity. We plan to collect fMRI data from 50 participants; data collection is ongoing (current n = 12). Participants first complete a variation of a VF task, in which they must produce 30 words as fast as possible across five categories (“animals”, “hobbies”, “emotions”, “what evokes positive emotions”, “what evokes negative emotions”). Subsequently, participants undergo two event-related fMRI runs in which their self-generated words are presented visually. During the first passive run, participants simply read the words presented in a randomized order. In the second active run, participants rate the personal relevance of each presented word, this time in the original order, on a five-point scale. In addition, participants perform creativity tests, including the AUT. The fMRI analyses will examine how ratings of personal relevance relate to neural activity in autobiographical memory-related networks, with a focus on the precuneus, medial frontal regions, angular gyrus, and the hippocampus. In particular, neural activity during passive word reading will be compared between words that were later rated as highly versus weakly personally relevant during the active run. Regression analyses will then be conducted to investigate whether patterns of recruitment within autobiographical memory-related networks predict individual differences in creative performance. Overall, the study aims to clarify how autobiographical retrieval contributes to verbal creative cognition and flexible memory search by combining behavioral and neuroimaging approaches to investigate processes that are otherwise difficult to assess directly.
Topic Areas: Language Production,