Mathias Benedek

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

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 cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for crea...

Creativity reflects the remarkable human capacity to produce novel and effective ideas. Empirical work suggests that creative ideas do not just emerge out of nowhere but typically result from goal-directed memory processes. Specifically, creative ideation is supported by controlled retrieval, involves semantic and episodic memory, builds on process...

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...

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...

Research indicated an association of acute and chronic physical activity with creative ideation performance. However, no study to date applied ecologically valid ambulatory methods with the potential to generalize these positive relationships to everyday life contexts. This study assessed acute and chronic physical activity (i.e., number of steps a...

How are ideas born? Contrary to commonly held beliefs, creative performance, like any goal-oriented action, requires understanding and managing one's own cognitive processes – thus, efficient metacognition. Recently, a systematic framework of creative metacognition has been proposed, assuming the relevance of metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, an...

Creative ideation tasks are typically ill-defined and open-ended, and thus should benefit from metacognition efforts. However, the role of metacognitive processes – especially metacognitive control – in creative ideation appears understudied. Therefore, we conducted an online study (N = 317) investigating the relationship between divergent thinking...

Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability an...

When we engage in internally directed cognition, like doing mental arithmetic or mind wandering, fewer cognitive resources are assigned for other activities like reacting to perceptual input-an effect termed perceptual decoupling. However, the exact conditions under which perceptual decoupling occurs and its underlying cognitive mechanisms are stil...

Creative cognition does not just involve cognitive processes in direct service of the main task objective (e.g., idea generation), but also metacognitive processes that monitor and regulate cognition adaptively (e.g., evaluation of ideas and task performance, or development and selection of task strategies). Although metacognition is vital for crea...

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 metaanalysis described here can be considered the first to date that specifically focuses on the relationship between creative potential, as measured by divergent...

Associative thinking plays a major role in creativity, as it involves the ability to link distant concepts. Yet, the neural mechanisms allowing to combine distant associates in creative thinking tasks remain poorly understood. We investigated the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns related to combining remote associations for creative thin...

The present study aimed to integrate evidence on the relationship among broad retrieval ability (Gr), processing speed (Gs), and divergent thinking (DT) with a three-level meta-analytic approach. The analysis was conducted on 560 effect sizes obtained from 47 studies with an overall sample of 10,391 participants. Results indicated moderate mean cor...

When we engage in internally directed cognition, like doing mental arithmetic or mind wandering, fewer cognitive resources are assigned for other activities like reacting to perceptual input - an effect termed perceptual decoupling. However, the exact conditions under which perceptual decoupling occurs and its underlying cognitive mechanisms are st...

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...

Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), are widely employed in cognitive neuroscience to identify causal links between specific brain structures supporting sensory, motor, cognitive and affective functions. During the last decade, NIBS technique...

Twitter has become a popular platform for sharing and discussing everyday experiences, including creativity. In this study, we explored the public conceptualization of creativity on Twitter by analyzing co-listed hashtags associated with the term #creativity in millions of tweets. Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to identify a network of semanti...

Perceptual decoupling is an attentional mechanism that helps us maintain an internalfocus by disengaging attention from external, sensory information. Evidence for it can beseen in eye behavior, with several ocular parameters being indicative of internal versusexternal attention focus. Previous findings showed that voluntary eye movements are affec...

The present study aimed to integrate evidence on the relationship among divergent thinking (DT), broad retrieval ability (Gr), and processing speed (Gs) with a three-level meta-analytic approach. The analysis was conducted on 536 effect sizes obtained from 41 studies with an overall sample of 9055 participants. Results indicated moderate mean corre...

Creative metacognitive monitoring represents the ability to accurately evaluate the quality of own ideas during idea generation. To the best of our knowledge, this study presents the first EEG investigation of creative metacognitive monitoring in the brain, using data, of 100 participants, who generated single, original uses of common objects (alte...

Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to 1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by human...

Psychometrically sound instruments that assess temporal dynamics of creative abilities are limited. The Ambulatory Battery of Creativity (ABC) is designed to assess creative ideation performance multiple times in everyday life and was proven to capture the intra-individual dynamic of creative abilities reliably and validly. The present ambulatory s...

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 in daily life show substantial variation in quality. Yet, most studies investigate the creative ideation process in highly controlled laboratory contexts, which challenges the ecological validity of creativity research findings. In this article, we advocate the use of ambulatory assessments of creative ideation to gain deeper insight...

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...

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...

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...