Does Creativity Influence Visual Perception? - An Event-Related Potential Study With Younger and Older Adults

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology of Creativity
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Understanding the cognitive underpinnings of creativity is crucial but limited.
• The influence of creativity on visual stimulus perception and processing stages remains unclear.
• The role of healthy aging in these creative cognitive processes needs further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if figural creativity affects visual stimulus perception.
• To determine which stages of visual processing are influenced by creativity.
• To examine the impact of healthy aging on creativity-related visual processing.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an active oddball paradigm with unambiguous and ambiguous portrait paintings.
• Recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) and applied ERP decoding analyses.
• Compared four groups: younger less creative, younger creative, older less creative, and older creative adults.

Main Results:

• Early visual processing showed no significant differences between creativity groups.
• Later ERP stages (300-500 ms) revealed larger amplitudes in creative versus less creative groups.
• Ambiguous stimuli elicited larger amplitudes than unambiguous ones in younger groups (300-500 ms), a distinction less clear in older adults via traditional ERPs but visible with decoding analysis.

Conclusions:

• Visual creativity does not appear to influence early perception stages.
• Creativity affects stimulus processing in later stages (300-500 ms), indicating differences in top-down control.
• Younger creative individuals exhibit more flexible cognitive control during visual processing, with aging potentially altering these effects.