Category fluency and creative potential in semantic aphasia.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Creative cognition relies on semantic control or spreading activation.
• Semantic aphasia (SA) involves impaired semantic control but preserved semantic representations.
• The impact of impaired semantic control on creativity in SA remains unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate creative potential in semantic aphasia patients.
• To determine if spreading activation alone can support creative responses.
• To examine how task demands influence creativity in SA.

Main Methods:

• Assessed creative potential across three experiments using category judgment and fluency tasks.
• Included SA patients and healthy controls.
• Measured creativity via uniqueness, flexibility, semantic distance, and ratings.

Main Results:

• SA patients showed creative potential in constrained fluency tasks.
• Impaired semantic control affected strategy use in unconstrained fluency.
• No group differences in creativity emerged when fluency was controlled.

Conclusions:

• Spreading activation can support creative responses even with impaired semantic control.
• Creative potential in SA is task-dependent and sensitive to context.