Changes of creative ability and underlying brain network connectivity throughout the lifespan

Creativity, or divergent thinking, is essential to and supported by cognitive functions necessary for everyday tasks. The current study investigates divergent thinking and its neural mechanisms from adolescence to late adulthood. To do this, 180 healthy participants completed a creativity task called the egg task including 86 adolescents (mean age (SD) = 13.62 (1.98)), 52 young adults (24.92 (3.60), and 42 older adults (62.84 (7.02)). Additionally, a subsample of 111 participants completed a resting-state fMRI scan. After investigating the impact of age on different divergent thinking metrics, we investigated the impact of age on the association between divergent thinking and resting-state functional connectivity within and between major resting-state brain networks associated with creative thinking: the DMN, ECN, and SN. Adolescents tended to be less creative than both young and older adults in divergent thinking scores related to expansion creativity, and not in persistent creativity, while young and older adults performed relatively similar. We found that adolescents' functional integrity of the executive control network (ECN) was positively associated with expansion creativity, which was significantly different from the negative association in both the young and older adults. These results suggest that creative performance and supporting brain networks change throughout the lifespan.