Neural mechanisms underlying the influence of retrieval ability on creating and recalling creative ideas

Previous studies revealed a close relationship between retrieval ability and creative thinking; however, it is still unclear what processes of creative thinking are influenced by retrieval ability. This study applied a novel task paradigm to distinguish between different processes of creative thinking. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the differences of cortical activation and functional connectivity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and temporal cortex between high (HRA) and low (LRA) retrieval ability groups during creating original ideas (CO) and recalling original ideas (RO) tasks. The behaviour results revealed that in the CO task, the HRA group performed better than the LRA group on fluency, flexibility, and originality. Importantly, the fNIRS results further indicated that the HRA group exhibited higher activation of the l-TPJ, l-STG, l-MTG, r-FPC, r-DLPFC than the LRA group during the CO task. Moreover, the HRA group exhibited higher activation of the bilateral TPJ, l-STG, l-MTG, r-DLPFC, and r-FPC in the CO task than in the RO task, and the LRA group exhibited higher activation of the l-STG in the CO task than in the RO task. The functional connectivity between the PFC and IFG, TPJ, and MTG of the HRA group was significantly stronger than that of the LRA group in both the CO and RO tasks. The findings suggest that high retrieval ability could facilitate the generation of creative ideas by facilitating the retrieval of novel information and suppression of common information compared to low retrieval ability. This study provides neural evidence for the effect of different levels of retrieval ability on creative thinking.