Neural Correlates of Creativity in Schizotypy: an fMRI study.
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1
University of Auckland, School of Psychology, New Zealand
Creativity is considered to be one of the attributes that define humanity, and is tied to the concepts of originality, flexibility, and variety. Evidence suggests a link between creativity and psychopathology, where a positive association is seen between aberrant/psychotic behaviours and high achievers. Research has also found a positive correlation between tests of creativity and measures which assess psychosis liability, specifically schizotypy. Schizotypy is defined as a cluster of subclinical symptoms and personality traits within a healthy population, which may lead to a predisposition to schizophrenia. It has been suggested that those who score high on measures of schizotypy also show a lack of cognitive inhibition leading to unusual thought processes and the generation of original ideas. The aim of this study was to use fMRI to determine the neural correlates of highly schizotypic individuals during creative performance.
Functional images were acquired for 38 healthy adults, who were given verbal and performance creativity tasks. The results indicate an overall greater cortical activation for those with high schizotypy levels compared to the control group, where increased activations were observed in the left middle temporal gyrus for the verbal task, and in the right inferior frontal gyrus for the performance task.
These results suggest that individuals who display schizotypal traits are able to utilise additional cortical regions when completing tasks which require creative thought, and are in line with research which indicate that a greater spread of cortical activation is an important factor in creative thinking. Furthermore, there is evidence of task specificity, where different types of task (verbal vs. performance) contribute to the activation of distinctive cortical areas (left vs. right hemisphere), adding to the idea that there may be specialised regions for different domains of creative behaviour.
Keywords:
Psychopathology,
creativity,
functional MRI,
schizotypy,
originality
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Cognition and Executive Processes
Citation:
Park
H,
Roberts
R,
Kirk
I and
Waldie
K
(2015). Neural Correlates of Creativity in Schizotypy: an fMRI study..
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00288
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
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Correspondence:
Ms. Haeme Park, University of Auckland, School of Psychology, Auckland, New Zealand, haeme.park@auckland.ac.nz