Event Related Potentials’ Characteristics in the Different Models of Verbal Creative Thinking

The comparative study of three different models of creativethinking in unified event-related (ERP) paradigm is presented. Thesubjects (18–35 years old) performed the following tasks: PROVERBS(a divergent creative task to overcome stereotypes of long-termmemory), REMOTE ASSOCIATIONS (a convergent creative task activatingremote semantic fields), ALTERNATIVE USES TASK (a divergent creativetask with the initiation of the associative search process). Inthe creative tasks, subjects required to create an original endingto a proverb (Pr), find a word that could be matched with threepresented words from different semantic fields (RAT), invent originalways of using common objects (AUT). In the control tasks subjectswere required to recall a well-known ending to a proverb (PrM),and to list/name objects from a given category (CAT). The ERP amplitudeswere analyzed when comparing the tasks with each other. Greaternegativity was observed for the a component with around 300 ms latency(~N300) in frontal regions (280–346 ms after stimuli onset) in thePr task, which probably reflects inhibition of the patterns of long-termmemory. In the Pr and RAT tasks, semantic retrieval and integrationof new information versus retrieval of known information from memory(PrM) was characterized by lower amplitude values of late componentsat the 698–786 ms interval. The greater amplitude of late ERP componentsin parietal regions (524–624 ms) during divergent thinking (AUT)may correspond to the greater emergence of images in this task comparedto more abstract RAT and Pr tasks. Thus, even in the early stagesof information processing in verbal creative tasks performance,the specificity of different models of creative thinking appearsin the same temporal paradigm and similar visual stimuli presentation.