Standing out: an atypical salience account of creativity.

Creativity often entails gaining a novel perspective, yet it remains uncertain how this is accomplished. Atypical salience processing may foster creative thinking by prioritizing putatively irrelevant information, thereby broadening the material accessible for idea generation and inhibiting attentional fixedness; in essence, motivating creative individuals to incorporate information that others overlook.

Why creatives don't find the oddball odd: Neural and psychological evidence for atypical salience processing.

Creativity has previously been linked with various attentional phenomena, including unfocused or broad attention. Although this has typically been interpreted through an executive functioning framework, such phenomena may also arise from atypical incentive salience processing. Across two studies, we examine this hypothesis both neurally and psychologically. First we examine the relationship between figural creativity and event-related potentials during an audio-visual oddball task, finding that rater creativity of drawings is associated with a diminished P300 response at midline electrodes, while abstractness and elaborateness of the drawings is associated with an altered distribution of the P300 over posterior electrodes. These findings support the notion that creativity may involve an atypical attribution of salience to prominent information. We further explore the incentive salience hypothesis by examining relationships between creativity and a psychological indicator of incentive salience captured by participants' ratings of enjoyment (liking) and their motivation to pursue (wanting) diverse real world rewards, as well as their positive spontaneous thoughts about those rewards. Here we find enhanced motivation to pursue activities as well as a reduced relationship between the overall tendency to enjoy rewards and the tendency to pursue them. Collectively, these findings indicate that creativity may be associated with atypical allocation of attentional and motivational resources to novel and rewarding information, potentially allowing more types of information access to attentional resources and motivating more diverse behaviors. We discuss the possibility that salience attribution in creatives may be less dependent on task-relevance or hedonic pleasure, and suggest that atypical salience attribution may represent a trait-like feature of creativity.

LSD and creativity: Increased novelty and symbolic thinking, decreased utility and convergent thinking.

BACKGROUND: Controversy surrounds psychedelics and their potential to boost creativity. To date, psychedelic studies lack a uniform conceptualization of creativity and methodologically rigorous designs. AIMS: This study aimed at addressing previous issues by examining the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on creativity using multimodal tasks and multidimensional approaches. METHODS: In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, 24 healthy volunteers received 50 µg of LSD or inactive placebo. Near drug peak, a creativity task battery was applied, including pattern meaning task (PMT), alternate uses task (AUT), picture concept task (PCT), creative metaphors task (MET) and figural creativity task (FIG). Creativity was assessed by scoring creativity criteria (novelty, utility, surprise), calculating divergent thinking (fluency, originality, flexibility, elaboration) and convergent thinking, computing semantic distances (semantic spread, semantic steps) and searching for data-driven special features. RESULTS: LSD, compared to placebo, changed several creativity measurements pointing to three overall LSD-induced phenomena: (1) 'pattern break', reflected by increased novelty, surprise, originality and semantic distances; (2) decreased 'organization', reflected by decreased utility, convergent thinking and, marginally, elaboration; and (3) 'meaning', reflected by increased symbolic thinking and ambiguity in the data-driven results. CONCLUSION: LSD changed creativity across modalities and measurement approaches. Three phenomena of pattern break, disorganization and meaning seemed to fundamentally influence creative cognition and behaviour pointing to a shift of cognitive resources 'away from normal' and 'towards the new'. LSD-induced symbolic thinking might provide a tool to support treatment efficiency in psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Is perception the missing link between creativity, curiosity and schizotypy? Evidence from spontaneous eye-movements and responses to auditory oddball stimuli.

What is the relationship between creativity, curiosity, and schizotypy? Schizophrenia-spectrum conditions and creativity have been linked to deficits in filtering sensory information, and curiosity is associated with information-seeking. This raises the possibility of a perception-based link between all three concepts. Here, we investigated whether the same individual differences in perceptual encoding explain variance in creativity, curiosity, and schizotypy. We administered an active auditory oddball task and a free viewing eye-tracking paradigm (N = 88). Creativity was measured with the figural portion of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and two self-report scales. Schizotypy and curiosity were measured with self-reports. We found that creativity was associated with increased reaction time to the rare tone in the oddball task and was positively associated with the number and duration of fixations in the free viewing task. Schizotypy, on the other hand, showed a negative trend with the number and duration of fixations. Both creativity and curiosity were positively associated with explorative eye movements (unique number of regions visited) and Shannon entropy, while schizotypy was negatively associated with entropy. We further compared saliency maps finding that individuals high versus low in creativity and curiosity, respectively, exhibit differences in where they look. These findings may suggest a perception-based link between creativity and curiosity, but not schizotypy. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.