Mathias Benedek

Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz | KFU Graz · Institute of Psychology

This fMRI study investigated brain activation during creative idea generation using a novel approach allowing spontaneous self-paced generation and expression of ideas. Specifically, we addressed the fundamental question of what brain processes are relevant for the generation of genuinely new creative ideas, in contrast to the mere recollection of...

Divergent thinking tasks are commonly used as indicators of creative potential, but traditional scoring methods of ideational originality face persistent problems such as low reliability and lack of convergent and discriminant validity. Silvia et al. (2008) have proposed a subjective top-2 scoring method, where participants are asked to select thei...

Intelligence and creativity are known to be correlated constructs suggesting that they share a common cognitive basis. The present study assessed three specific executive abilities – updating, shifting, and inhibition – and examined their common and differential relations to fluid intelligence and creativity (i.e., divergent thinking ability) withi...

The investigation of creative cognition is rapidly advancing, driven by important methodological developments related to the modeling and scoring of creative performance, and stimulated by exciting contributions from cognitive neuroscience. Here, we argue that a deeper understanding of this complex cognitive capacity requires defining the role of i...

Creative thinking relies on the ability to make remote associations and fruitfully combine unrelated concepts. Hence, original associations and bi-associations (i.e., associations to one and two concepts, respectively) are considered elementary cognitive processes of creative cognition. In this work, we investigated the cognitive and brain mechanis...

Eye behavior differs between internally and externally directed cognition and thus is indicative of an internal versus external attention focus. Recent work implicated perceptual decoupling (i.e., eye behavior becoming less determined by the sensory environment) as one of the key mechanisms involved in these attention-related eye movement differenc...

Creative ideas likely result from searching and combining semantic memory knowledge, yet the mechanisms acting on memory to yield creative ideas remain unclear. Here, we identified the neurocognitive correlates of semantic search components related to creative abilities. We designed an associative fluency task based on polysemous words and distingu...

Online worlds offer a massive display of people’s lives including their creative activities. In the present study, we investigated do-it-yourself (DIY) videos on YouTube to explore the type and prevalence of everyday creative behaviors. DIY is a term associated with the production of original and effective products, and, like YouTube, typically fea...

This study presents a coding scheme for design protocols that is derived from Triple Process Theory postulating the existence of three categories of cognitive processes: spontaneous, deliberate, and metacognitive. We applied the coding scheme to think-aloud protocols of designers engaged in an open design task. Results show that all three types occ...

Design space is a common abstraction used in the investigation of design cognition. Characteristic properties of design spaces and how they change are underexplored. Design spaces can vary with the design task and its constraints, which are assumed to result in differences in neuro-cognitive processes. We review general cognition, creative cognitio...

This paper presents results from a design neurocognition study on the effect of gender on EEG frequency band power when performing constrained and open design. We used electroencephalography to measure the brain activity of 84 professional designers. We investigated differences in frequency power associated with gender of 38 female and 46 male desi...

Associative theories of creativity argue that creative cognition involves the abilities to generate remote associations and make useful connections between unrelated concepts in one’s semantic memory. Yet, whether and how real-life creative behavior relies on semantic memory structure and its neural substrates remains unclear. We acquired multi-ech...

A large body of research has revealed that viewing example image stimuli tends to constrain creative idea generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying such visual fixation in creative cognition are unclear. In the present experiment, we explored whether example images impacted creative imagination and patterns of neural activity wi...

Myths about creativity keep contributing to its mysterious aura despite our increasing scientific understanding of this complex phenomenon. This study examined the prevalence of known creativity myths across six countries from diverse cultural backgrounds and explored why some people believe in them more than others. Results revealed persistent, wi...

This study examined the effects of a two-week running intervention on depressive symptoms and structural changes of different subfields of the hippocampus in young adults from the general population. The intervention was realized in small groups of participants in a mostly forested area and was organized into seven units of about 60 minutes each. T...

In this paper, we present results from an experiment using EEG to measure brain activity and explore EEG frequency power associated with gender differences of professional industrial designers while performing two prototypical stages of constrained and open design tasks, problem-solving and design sketching. Results indicate no main effect of gende...

Creative cognition relies on the ability to form remote associations between concepts, which allows to generate novel ideas or solve new problems. Such an ability is related to the organization of semantic memory; yet whether real-life creative behavior relies on semantic memory organization and its neural substrates remains unclear. Therefore, thi...

Creativity research crucially relies on creativity evaluations by external raters, but it is not clear what properties characterize good raters. In the present study, we investigated whether rater personality and rater creativity are related to discernment (i.e., the ability to distinguish creative from uncreative responses) when evaluating others’...

Many goal-directed, as well as spontaneous everyday activities (e.g., planning, mind-wandering), rely on an internal focus of attention. In this fMRI–eye-tracking coregistration study, we investigated brain mechanisms and eye behavior related to internally versus externally directed cognition. Building on an established paradigm, we manipulated int...

Digitalization, underpinned by the ongoing pandemic, has transferred many of our everyday activities to online places. In this study, we wanted to find out what online outlets people use to share their creative work and why they do it. We found that most people posted creative work online at least a few times per year. They especially shared creati...

It has been shown that conclusions about the human mental state can be drawn from eye gaze behavior by several previous studies. For this reason, eye tracking recordings are suitable as input data for attentional state classifiers. In current state-of-the-art studies, the extracted eye tracking feature set usually consists of descriptive statistics...

Even though a relationship between psychopathology and creativity has been postulated since the time of ancient Greece, systematic meta-analyses on this topic are still scarce. Thus, the meta-analysis described here can be considered the first to date that specifically focuses on the relationship between creative potential, as measured by divergent...

Digitalization, underpinned by the ongoing pandemic, has transferred many of our everyday activities to online places. In this study, we wanted to find out what online outlets people use to share their creative work and why they do it. We found that most people posted creative work online at least a few times per year. They especially shared creati...

The link between creativity and psychopathology is legendary and has been studied until today. The first part of the present paper describes the current stage of literature with a clear focus on psychopathologies and personality traits, which are closely linked with psychosis and psychosis-proneness. The second part outlines how these traits might...

Eye behavior is increasingly used as an indicator of internal versus external focus of attention both in research and application. However, available findings are partly inconsistent, which might be attributed to the different nature of the employed types of internal and external cognition tasks. The present study, therefore, investigated how consi...

This paper provides a meta-analytic update on the relationship between intelligence and divergent thinking (DT), as research on this topic has increased, and methods have diversified since Kim’s meta-analysis in 2005. A three-level meta-analysis was used to analyze 875 correlation coefficients from 112 studies with an overall N = 33,897. The overal...

Creativity is an important source of success in soccer players. In order to be effective in soccer, unpredictable, sudden and at the same time creative (i.e., unique, original, and effective) ideas are required in situations with high time pressure. Accordingly, creative task performance in soccer should be primarily driven by rapid and automatic c...

Creativity research crucially relies on creativity evaluations by external raters, but it is not clear what properties characterize good raters. In the present study, we investigated whether rater personality and rater creativity are related to discernment when evaluating others’ responses. To this end, 166 novice raters evaluated a pre-selected se...

Mathematical creativity is perceived as an increasingly important aspect of everyday life and, consequently, research has increased over the past decade. However, mathematical creativity has mainly been investigated in children and adolescents so far. Therefore, the first goal of the current study was to develop a mathematical creativity measure fo...

Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in eve...

Eye behavior is increasingly used as indicator of internal vs. external focus of attention both in research and application. However, available findings are partly inconsistent, which might be attributed to the different nature of the employed types of internal and external cognition tasks. The present study, therefore, investigated how consistentl...

Many goal-directed, as well as spontaneous everyday activities (e.g., planning, mind-wandering), rely on an internal focus of attention. In this fMRI-eye-tracking coregistration study, we investigated brain mechanisms and eye behavior related to internally versus externally directed cognition. Building on an established paradigm, we manipulated int...

Introduction Many goal‐directed and spontaneous everyday activities (e.g., planning, mind wandering) rely on an internal focus of attention. Internally directed cognition (IDC) was shown to differ from externally directed cognition in a range of neurophysiological indicators such as electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha activity and eye behavior. Metho...

This preregistered study aimed to replicate and extend research on the role of cognitive control in creative cognition by examining dose effects of alcohol in a randomized controlled trial. A sample of 125 participants was randomly assigned to three experimental groups, either drinking alcoholic beer (BAC = 0.03 or 0.06) or drinking non-alcoholic b...

Previous research has indicated that in several domains, women and men may use different cognitive processes along with different neurophysiological activation to achieve similar behavioral performance. The present study extended this line of research to the novel field of soccer playing. In female and male active soccer players, we investigated pa...

When we engage in internally directed cognition (e.g., planning or imagination), our eye behavior decouples from external stimuli and couples to internal representations (e.g., internal visualizations of ideas). Here, we investigated whether eye behavior predicts the susceptibility to visual distraction during internally directed cognition. To this...

Many goal-directed, as well as spontaneous everyday activities (e.g., planning, mind wandering) rely on an internal focus of attention. In this EEG-eye-tracking co-registration study, we investigated effects of attention direction on EEG alpha activity and various relevant eye parameters. We used an established paradigm to manipulate internal atten...

Cognitive and neuroimaging evidence suggests that episodic and semantic memory—memory for autobiographical events and conceptual meaning, respectively—support different facets of creative thinking, with a growing number of studies reporting activation of brain regions within the default network during performance on creative thinking tasks. The pre...

Drei grundsätzliche Ziele verfolgte diese Arbeit: Zunächst die Differenzierung von vulnerablem und grandiosem Narzissmus anhand der Beziehung zwischen Narzissmus und emotionaler Intelligenz. Des Weiteren soll Narzissmus zum ersten Mal mit Emotionsmanagement in Verbindung gebracht werden. Zuletzt sollte das neue Konstrukt „typisches Emotionsmanageme...

The neuroscientific investigation of creative cognition has advanced by considering the functional connectivity between brain regions and its dynamic changes over time, which are consistent with stages in the ideation process. Surprisingly, although the communication between neuronal networks takes place in a time-scale of milliseconds, EEG studies...

The current attentional state can be divided into several categories, for example, the direction of attention. Often, this state is subconscious or its constant report impossible. Thus, an automated surveillance of the attentional state could be beneficial. In this paper, we performed a classification of multimodal data (EEG and eye tracking) to mo...

While earlier neuroscience studies on creativity have been criticized due to their heterogeneity of findings, recent studies in this field have converged to some common practices and methodological approaches, which have greatly contributed to enhance both the reliability and reproducibility of findings in this field. Relevant neuroscience findings...

The associative theory of creativity suggests that creative abilities rely on the organization of semantic associations in memory. Recent research has demonstrated that semantic network methods allow testing this hypothesis. The aim of the current study was to investigate the properties of semantic networks at the individual level, in relation to c...

Functional neuroimaging research has recently begun to explore cognitive mechanisms of creativity that underlie the interactions between large-scale brain networks—specifically regions of the executive control (ECN) and default (DN) networks. Increased ECN-DN coupling has been shown to occur when participants are required to overcome conceptual int...

Divergent thinking (DT) ability (i.e., the ability to come up with creative ideas) is a complex cognitive construct that has been associated with several specific components of the Cattel-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model. In this study, we employed a nested latent variable approach to examine the specific role of mental speed (Gs) and general retrieval abi...

In the presented work, a shift of perspective with respect to the dimensionality of divergent thinking (DT) tasks is introduced moving from the question of multidimensionality across DT scores (i.e., fluency, flexibility, or originality) to the question of multidimensionality within one holistic score of DT performance (i.e., snapshot ratings of cr...

The investigation of the neural correlates of creative cognition requires researchers to adapt creativity tasks to meet the constraints imposed by cognitive neuroscience research—assessing well-defined cognitive processes, repeated over many tasks. We present a brief review of essential study design parameters in neuroscience research on creativity...

Creativity assessment with open-ended production tasks relies heavily on scoring the quality of a subject's ideas. This creates a faceted measurement structure involving persons, tasks (and ideas within tasks), and raters. Most studies, however, do not model possible systematic differences among raters. The present study examines individual rater d...

This article introduces a new scale for the assessment of Appreciation for Creative Personality (ACP). The ACP scale is a brief 13-item forced-choice measure that assesses interindividual differences in the preference for interacting with creative people. ACP is considered an important factor of creative climate at the level of interpersonal intera...

This study investigated the effects of different types of creativity interventions on different facets of creative potential, also including more school‐related creativity demands. In a sample of 77 fourth‐graders in the age between 9 and 12 years, we administered a verbal and a figural creativity training, realized in two school lessons over two c...

Although there exists increasing knowledge about brain correlates underlying creative ideation in general, the specific neurocognitive mechanisms implicated in different stages of the creative thinking process are still under-researched. Some recent EEG studies suggested that alpha power during creative ideation varies as a function of time, with t...

When we engage in internally directed cognition (e.g. planning or imagination), our eye behavior decouples from external stimuli and couples to internal representations (e.g. internal visualizations of ideas). Here, we investigated whether eye behavior predicts the susceptibility to visual distraction during internally directed cognition. To this e...

People spend a lot of time on creative activities in their leisure time, but we still know little about what these activities are and what drives them. The literature suggests that several specific motives may be relevant for everyday creative behavior, including enjoyment, expression, challenge, coping, prosocial, social, material, recognition, an...

In the presented work, a shift of perspective with respect to the dimensionality of divergent thinking tasks is introduced moving from the question of multidimensionality across divergent thinking scores to the question of multidimensionality across the scale of divergent thinking scores. We apply IRTree models to test if the same latent trait can...

A growing body of evidence suggests that creativity is associated with functional connectivity across widespread neural networks, including regions associated with executive processes and cognitive control, along with regions linked to the default mode network (DMN) of the brain. This study investigated whether a three-week verbal divergent thinkin...

In this paper, we extract features of head pose, eye gaze, and facial expressions from video to estimate individual learners' attentional states in a classroom setting. We concentrate on the analysis of different definitions for a student's attention and show that available generic video processing components and a single video camera are sufficien...

When focused on a specific internal task like calculating a multiplication in mind we are able to ignore sensory distraction. This may be achieved by effective perceptual decoupling during internally directed cognition. The present study investigated whether decoupling from external events during internally directed cognition represents an active s...

Eye behavior in reaction to first distractor. Eye parameters were baseline corrected using the 500ms prior distractor appearance and are plotted relative to distractor appearance. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. (TIF)

Planned comparisons of the general effect of turning attention inward. Descriptive statistic and planned comparisons of the general effect of turning attention inward from reading operands (-0.5s to 0s) to calculating the multiplication in mind for each task separately. (DOCX)

Details on multiplications. Items, correct and false answers. (DOCX)

Average correlations between eye parameters. (DOCX)

Passive viewing vs. multiplications without and with distractor. Planned comparisons of eye behavior during passive viewing vs. multiplications without and with distractor. (DOCX)

This fMRI study investigated brain activity while soccer players were imagining creative moves in real soccer decision‐making situations. After presenting brief video clips of a soccer scene, participants had to imagine themselves as the acting player and think either of a creative or obvious move that might lead to a goal. Findings revealed strong...