The role of top-down control in divergent creativity remains heavily debated. An outstanding question about the state dynamics of creativity concerns acute shifts between heightened and lowered creative states. Particularly, do transitions between creative states incur a switch cost as observed in other domains of cognition? Prior research showed that asymmetric switch costs are often incurred such that reaction time is asymmetrically slower when participants switch from a task involving more top-down control to a task involving less top-down control. We tested the hypothesis that frequent acute transitions from creativity-cued responding (associated with heightened creative state) to uncued responding (associated with lowered creative state) would incur an asymmetric switch cost such that uncued responding would be disproportionately impacted by state changes. We utilized the thin slices verb generation task in a task-switching paradigm. Consistent with the hypothesis of asymmetric switch costs in shifts between creative states, we observed a substantial switch cost when switching from creativity-cued trials to uncued trials, but no switch cost when switching from uncued trials to creativity-cued trials. These findings provide indirect evidence that heightened creative states may require substantially more top-down control than lowered creative states, supporting the theory that divergent creativity requires increased top-down control.

We review several new and emerging methods of non-invasive neuromodulation and consider their potential to enhance creative cognition. This review covers the following techniques: transcranial electric stimulation (tES) (which includes transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), and transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS)), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (tFUS), and neurofeedback training (NFT). For each technique, we explain the basic mechanism of action, review relevant research demonstrating its ability to enhance creative cognition, consider limitations and advantages, and suggest future research directions. Lastly, we offer broader conclusions and recommendations for the field of creativity neuromodulation.

Creativity often requires envisioning novel connections and combinations among elements in space, e.g., to invent a new product or generate a work of art. A relationship between spatial cognition and creativity has been demonstrated at both the behavioral and neural levels, but the exact neurocognitive mechanisms that bridge this connection remain unclear. The present study tested whether individual differences in functional activation in spatial cognition-implicated brain regions (specifically focusing on premotor and superior parietal cortex) during mental rotation were associated with figural creativity in a composite object creation task. Functional activation in premotor and superior parietal cortex during a classical spatial task (mental rotation; MRT) has previously been causally linked with dissociable components of spatial cognition: superior parietal activity with abstract spatial representation, and premotor activity with active spatial manipulation. The present findings indicate that individual differences in functional activation of both superior parietal cortex and premotor cortex during MRT were associated with individual differences in figural creativity. The present data thus provide new evidence of a correlation between the activity in spatial cognition-implicated brain regions and figural creativity, and suggest initial insights into particular components of spatial processing (both representation and manipulation) that may be related to creative ability.

A central challenge for creativity research-as for all areas of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience-is to establish a mapping between constructs and measures (i.e., identifying a set of tasks that best captures a set of creative abilities). A related challenge is to achieve greater consistency in the measures used by different researchers; inconsistent measurement hinders progress toward shared understanding of cognitive and neural components of creativity. New resources for aggregating neuroimaging data, and the emergence of methods for identifying structure in multivariate data, present the potential for new approaches to address these challenges. Identifying meta-analytic structure (i.e., similarity) in neural activity associated with creativity tasks might help identify subsets of these tasks that best reflect the similarity structure of creativity-relevant constructs. Here, we demonstrated initial proof-of-concept for such an approach. To build a model of similarity between creativity-relevant constructs, we first surveyed creativity researchers. Next, we used NeuroSynth meta-analytic software to generate maps of neural activity robustly associated with tasks intended to measure the same set of creativity-relevant constructs. A representational similarity analysis-based approach identified particular constructs-and particular tasks intended to measure those constructs-that positively or negatively impacted the model fit. This approach points the way to identifying optimal sets of tasks to capture elements of creativity (i.e., dimensions of similarity space among creativity constructs), and has long-term potential to meaningfully advance the ontological development of creativity research with the rapid growth of creativity neuroscience. Because it relies on neuroimaging meta-analysis, this approach has more immediate potential to inform longer-established fields for which more extensive sets of neuroimaging data are already available.