Roger E Beaty

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Psychology

Creativity has long been thought to involve associative processes in memory: connecting concepts to form ideas, inventions, and artworks. However, associative thinking has been difficult to study due to limitations in modeling memory structure and retrieval processes. Recent advances in computational models of semantic memory allow researchers to e...

Creative thinking is important for success in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet creativity in STEM is perhaps the most under-researched question in the creativity literature, with little known about the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting scientific creative thinking abilities, such as hypothesis generatio...

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...

Scientific creativity involves creating novel links between distant scientific and non-scientific concepts. Such creative linking can be captured with the novel Word-sentence-construction (Woseco) task. The Woseco task emphasises syntactic and context-related connections (e.g. "teacher" and "blackboard" being syntactically and contextually connecte...

Scientific creativity involves creating novel links between distant scientific and non-scientific concepts. Such creative linking can be captured with the novel Word-sentence-construction (Woseco) task. The Woseco task emphasises syntactic and context-related connections (e.g. “teacher” and “blackboard” being syntactically and contextually connecte...

Metaphor is crucial in human cognition and creativity, facilitating abstract thinking, analogical reasoning, and idea generation. Typically, human raters manually score the originality of responses to creative thinking tasks – a laborious and error-prone process. Previous research sought to remedy these risks by scoring creativity tasks automatical...

Crystallized intelligence (Gc)-knowledge acquired through education and experience-supports creativity. Yet whether Gc contributes to creativity beyond providing access to more knowledge, remains unclear. We explore the role of a "flexible" semantic memory network structure as a potential shared mechanism of Gc and creativity. Across two studies (N...

Fostering creativity is vital for tackling 21st-century challenges, and education plays a key role in nurturing this skill. According to the associative theory, creativity involves connecting distant concepts in semantic memory. Here, we explore how semantic memory changes following an educational intervention intended to promote creativity. Specif...

Automated scoring is a current hot topic in creativity research. However, most research has focused on the English language and popular verbal creative thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task. Therefore, in this study, we present a large language model approach for automated scoring of a scientific creative thinking task that assesses diver...

Question-asking, an essential yet often understudied activity, holds significant implications for learning, creativity, and cognitive development. In particular, the quality and complexity of the questions asked are crucial factors affecting these fields. Previous research has explored open-ended question complexity through frameworks like the Bloo...

State-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence (AI) can now match humans in creativity tests and is at the cusp of augmenting the creativity of every knowledge worker on Earth. We argue that enriching generative AI applications with insights from the psychological sciences may revolutionize our understanding of creativity and lead to increasin...

The “standard” definition of creativity as novel and useful describes creative products, but creativity is constituted by processes. This misalignment contributes to the oft-noted challenges of operationalizing creativity. Here, we distinguish creativity as a process from creativity as an attribute (i.e. “creative-ness”). Operating from a priori pr...

The visual modality is central to both reception and expression of human creativity. Creativity assessment paradigms, such as structured drawing tasks Barbot (2018), seek to characterize this key modality of creative ideation. However, visual creativity assessment paradigms often rely on cohorts of expert or naïve raters to gauge the level of creat...

Creative cognition is the driving force behind all cultural and scientific progress. In recent years, the field of neurocognitive creativity research (NCR) has made considerable progress in revealing the neural and psychological correlates of creative cognition. However, a detailed understanding of how cognitive processes produce creative ideas, an...

Complex cognitive processes, like creative thinking, rely on interactions among multiple neurocognitive processes to generate effective and innovative behaviors on demand, for which the brain’s connector hubs play a crucial role. However, the unique contribution of specific hub sets to creative thinking is unknown. Employing three functional magnet...

Metaphor is crucial in human cognition and creativity, facilitating abstract thinking, analogical reasoning, and idea generation. Typically, human raters manually score the originality of responses to creative thinking tasks—a laborious and error-prone process. Previous research sought to remedy these risks by scoring creativity tasks automatically...

Creative problem-solving is a naturalistic form of creative thinking involving the generation of solutions that are not only original but also of high quality (i.e., plausible and effective). Naturalistic tasks that evaluate both originality and quality are vital for the promotion of creativity in real-world settings—yet scoring such tasks remains...

Human ratings are ubiquitous in creativity research. Yet the process of rating responses to creativity tasks—typically several hundred or thousands of responses, per rater—is often time consuming and expensive. Planned missing data designs, where raters only rate a subset of the total number of responses, have been recently proposed as one possible...

Across development, experience has a strong impact on the way we think and adapt. School experience affects academic and social-emotional outcomes, yet the extent to which pedagogy modulates underlying brain network development is still unknown. In this study, we compared brain network dynamics of students with different pedagogical backgrounds. Sp...

The research on the network neuroscience of creativity assesses coordinated neural activity across multiple brain regions to examine how these regions dynamically interact to give rise to creative thinking and behavior. Of the brain’s several networks, two have consistently been implicated in the creativity neuroscience literature: the default netw...

Dual process theories of creativity suggest that creative thought is supported by both a generation phase, where unconstrained ideas are generated and combined in novel ways, and an evaluation phase, where those ideas are filtered for usefulness in context. Neurocognitively, both the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network (ECN...

Increasing evidence suggests that specific memory systems (e.g., semantic vs. episodic) may support specific creative thought processes. However, there are a number of inconsistencies in the literature regarding the strength, direction, and influence of different memory (semantic, episodic, working, and short-term) and creativity (divergent and con...

For decades, researchers have struggled with measurement problems related to the construct validity of divergent and convergent thinking in creativity assessments. In response, some have called for battery-based approaches. Recently, digital games have emerged as a potential alternative, offering increased scalability and improved ecological validi...

Despite its theoretical importance, little is known about how semantic memory structure facilitates and constrains creative idea generation. We examine whether the semantic richness of a concept has both benefits and costs to creative idea generation. Specifically, we tested whether cue set size-an index of semantic richness reflecting the average...

Scoring divergent thinking tasks opens multiple avenues and possibilities – decisions researchers have to make. While some scholars postulate that scoring should focus on the best ideas provided, the measurement of the best responses (e.g., “top scoring”) comes along with challenges. More specifically, compared to the average quality across all res...

Creativity research often relies on human raters to judge the novelty of participants’ responses on open- ended tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Albeit useful, manual ratings are subjective and labor intensive. To address these limitations, researchers increasingly use automatic scoring methods based on a natural language processing te...

The associative theory posits that creativity relates to people’s ability to connect remote associations to form new ideas, based on the structure of their semantic memory. This theory has spurred several recent studies connecting semantic memory structure and associative thinking to creativity, capitalizing on advances in computational methods. To...

Music is a complex system consisting of many dimensions and hierarchically organized information-the organization of which, to date, we do not fully understand. Network science provides a powerful approach to representing such complex systems, from the social networks of people to modelling the underlying network structures of different cognitive m...

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...

Openness to Experience is most strongly related to aspects of high-level cognition, such as creativity. Yet, the role of cognitive capacities in Openness is still far from understood. We examine how individuals search their memory predicts levels of Openness. Participants (N = 163) had one minute to generate synonyms to the word hot, operationalize...

Fostering creative minds has always been a premise to ensure adaptation to new challenges of human civilization. While some alternative educational settings (i.e., Montessori) were shown to nurture creative skills, it is unknown how they impact underlying brain mechanisms across the school years. This study assessed creative thinking and resting‐st...

The associative theory of creativity has long held that creative thinking involves connecting remote concepts in semantic memory. Network science tools have recently been applied to map the organization of concepts in semantic memory, and to study the link between semantic memory and creativity. Yet such work has largely overlooked the domain of co...

Although both creativity and humor elicit experiences of surprise followed by appreciation, it remains unknown whether shared or distinct patterns of effective connectivity are involved in their processing. The present fMRI study used dynamic causal modeling and parametrical empirical Bayes analysis to examine the effective connectivity between the...

Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g., openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative per...

Computational research suggests that semantic memory, operationalized as semantic memory networks, undergoes age-related changes. Previous work suggests that concepts in older adults' semantic memory networks are more separated, more segregated, and less connected to each other. However, cognitive network research often relies on group averages (e....

Creativity has long been conceptually linked to experiences of emotion and mind wandering, yet these empirical relationships remain unclear, and few studies have explored the thoughts and emotions of creative people in daily life. To investigate how creativity relates to everyday cognitive and affective experiences, the present study (N = 159) used...

The visual modality is central to both reception and expression of human creativity. Creativity assessment paradigms, such as structured drawing tasks (Barbot, 2018), seek to characterize this key modality of creative ideation. However, visual creativity assessment paradigms often rely on cohorts of expert or naïve raters to gauge the level of crea...

Human ratings are ubiquitous in creativity research. Yet the process of rating responses to creativity tasks—typically several hundred or thousands of responses, per rater—is often time consuming and expensive. Planned missing data designs, where raters only rate a subset of the total number of responses, have been recently proposed as one possible...

We developed a novel conceptualization of one component of creativity in narratives by integrating creativity theory and distributional semantics theory. We termed the new construct divergent semantic integration (DSI), defined as the extent to which a narrative connects divergent ideas. Across nine studies, 27 different narrative prompts, and over...

Personality neuroscience is the study of persistent psychological individual differences, typically in the general population, using neuroscientific methods. It has the potential to shed light on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying individual differences and their manifestation in ongoing behavior and experience. The field was inaugurated man...

Research indicates that creative cognition depends on both associative and controlled processes, corresponding to the brain’s default mode (DMN) and executive control (ECN) networks. However, outstanding questions include how the DMN and ECN operate over time during creative task performance, and whether creative cognition involves distinct generat...

Evidence from fMRI research indicates that individual creative thinking ability – defined as performance on divergent thinking tasks, subjectively assessed by human raters – can be predicted based on the strength of functional connectivity (FC) between the brain’s default mode network (DMN) and frontoparietal control network (FPCN). Here, we sought...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research, w...

Semantic distance scoring provides an attractive alternative to other scoring approaches for responses in creative thinking tasks. In addition, evidence in support of semantic distance scoring has increased over the last few years. In one recent approach, it has been proposed to combine multiple semantic spaces to better balance the idiosyncratic i...

Marek et al. analyzed three very large magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets and concluded that thousands of participants are necessary to ensure replicable results in “brain-wide associations studies,” which they defined as “studies of the associations between common inter-individual variability in human brain structure/function and cognition...

Creativity research often relies on human raters to judge the novelty of participants’ responses on open-ended tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Albeit useful, manual ratings are subjective and labor intensive. To address these limitations, researchers increasingly use automatic scoring methods based on a natural language processing tec...

Researchers since the 1950s have invested a great deal in creating “gold standard” creativity assessments that can be administered in a controlled laboratory setting. Despite the successes in developing reliable and widely used instruments, these efforts have come at the cost of not using ecologically- and face-valid tasks. In this paper, we descri...

The rapid evolution of technology and automation today underscores the importance of understanding and facilitating human creativity. Although the psychological science of creativity is a relatively young field, significant progress has been made in recent years, and researchers are increasingly translating their work from the lab to real-world set...

Researchers have been studying creativity for decades, and yet controversy still surrounds the cognitive basis of creative thought. A longstanding question in the creativity literature concerns the role of memory in creative cognition. Increasing evidence suggests that specific memory systems (e.g., episodic vs. semantic) may support specific creat...

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...

Music is a complex system consisting of many dimensions and hierarchically organized information—the organization of which, to date, we do not fully understand. Network science provides a powerful approach to representing such complex systems, from the social networks of people to modelling the underlying network structures of different cognitive m...

How do we imagine visual objects and combine them to create new forms? To answer this question, we need to explore the cognitive, computational and neural mechanisms underlying imagery and creativity. The body of research on deep learning models with creative behaviors is growing. However, in this paper we suggest that the complexity of such models...

Narrative text permeates our lives from job applications to journalistic stories to works of fiction. Developing automated metrics that capture creativity in narrative text has potentially far reaching implications. Human ratings of creativity in narrative text are labor-intensive, subjective, and difficult to replicate. Across 27 different story p...

Education is central to the acquisition of knowledge, such as when children learn new concepts. It is unknown, however, whether educational differences impact not only what concepts children learn, but how those concepts come to be represented in semantic memory—a system that supports higher cognitive functions, such as creative thinking. Here we l...

Language production involves action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real-time, placing a computational burden on working memory that leads to sequencing biases in production. Here we examine whether these biases extend beyond language to constrain one of the most complex human behaviors: music improvisation. Using a large corpus of improvis...

Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance—including positive correlations with human creativity ratings—additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including identifyin...

One of the most complex forms of creativity is musical improvisation where new music is produced in real time. Brain behavior during music production has several dimensions depending on the conditions of the performance. The expression of creativity is suspected to be different whether novel ideas must be externalized using a musical instrument or...

Previous research indicates that episodic retrieval contributes to divergent creative thinking. However, this research has relied on standard laboratory tests of divergent creative thinking, such as generating creative uses for objects; it is unknown whether episodic retrieval also contributes to domain-specific forms of creativity. Here we start t...

Despite substantial progress in the quest of demystifying the brain basis of creativity, several questions remain open. One such issue concerns the relationship between two latent cognitive modes during creative thinking, i.e., deliberate goal-directed cognition and spontaneous thought generation. Although an interplay between deliberate and sponta...

The ability to produce novel ideas is central to societal progress and innovation; however, little is known about the biological basis of creativity. Here, we investigate the organization of brain networks that support creativity by combining functional neuroimaging data with gene expression information. Given the multifaceted nature of creative th...

Older adults tend to have a broader vocabulary compared to younger adults –indicating a richer storage of semantic knowledge – but their retrieval abilities decline with age. Recent advances in quantitative methods based on network science have investigated the effect of aging on semantic memory structure. However, it is yet to be determined how th...

Creative thinking is thought to be supported by both spontaneous associative and controlled executive processes. Recently, a new measure of associative cognition has been developed—forward flow—which uses computational semantic models (e.g., latent semantic analysis; LSA) to capture “how far” people travel in semantic space during a chained free as...

Creative cognition has been consistently associated with functional connectivity between frontoparietal control and default networks. However, recent research identified distinct connectivity dynamics for subnetworks within the larger frontoparietal system—one subnetwork (FPCNa) shows positive coupling with the default network and another subnetwor...

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination....

Research on everyday creativity—the “little c” creative activities people do in their everyday lives—commonly uses self-report scales to assess people’s engagement in different activities. The present research presents a detailed psychometric analysis of the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviors (BICB), a 34-item yes/no checklist of common c...

While a recent upsurge in the application of neuroimaging methods to creative cognition has yielded encouraging progress toward understanding the neural underpinnings of creativity, the neural basis of barriers to creativity are as yet unexplored. Here, we report the first investigation into the neural correlates of one such recently identified bar...

The present research examined the varieties of poor metaphors to gain insight into complex cognitive processes involved in generating creative ones. Drawing upon two prior studies as well as a new sample, adults’ open-ended responses to different metaphor prompts were categorized. Poor metaphors fell into two broad clusters. Non-metaphors—responses...

Despite substantial progress in the quest of demystifying the brain basis of creativity, several questions remain open. One such issue concerns the relationship between two latent cognitive modes during creative thinking, i.e., deliberate goal-directed cognition and spontaneous thought generation. Although an interplay between deliberate and sponta...

Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in ‘stimulus-independent thoughts' (SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate external environment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven by stimuli in one's external environment (i.e. stimulus-dependent thoughts;...

Recent studies of creative cognition have revealed interactions between functional brain networks involved in the generation of novel ideas; however, the neural basis of creativity is highly complex and presents a great challenge in the field of cognitive neuroscience, partly because of ambiguity around how to assess creativity. We applied a novel...

Generating creative ideas involves flexibly combining concepts stored in memory. Although memory provides a foundation for creative thought, existing associations can also constrain idea generation by acting as a source of interference, particularly when salient and unoriginal information becomes activated. Overcoming fixating effects of salient as...

Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking tasks. Although a relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and creative cognition has been well-do...

Research on everyday creativity—the “little c” creative activities people do in their everyday lives—commonly uses self-report scales to assess people’s engagement in different activities. The present research presents a detailed psychometric analysis of the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviors (BICB), a 34-item yes/no checklist of common c...

Are intelligence and creativity distinct abilities, or do they rely on the same cognitive and neural systems? We sought to quantify the extent to which intelligence and creative cognition overlap in brain and behavior by combining machine learning of fMRI data and latent variable modeling of cognitive ability data in a sample of young adults (N = 1...

Flexible Semantic Network Structure Supports Creative Metaphor Ability

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...

Whether creativity is a domain-general or domain-specific ability has been a topic of intense speculation. Although previous studies have examined domain-specific mechanisms of creative performance, little is known about commonalities and distinctions in neural correlates across different domains. We applied activation likelihood estimation (ALE) m...

Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants’ responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, t...

Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in “stimulus-independent thoughts”(SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate externalenvironment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven bystimuli in one’s external environment (i.e., stimulus-dependent thoughts; S...

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...

Objectives: A common finding in the mind-wandering literature is that older adults (OAs) tend to mind-wander less frequently than young adults (YAs). Here, we sought to determine whether this age-related difference in mind-wandering is attributable to age-related differences in motivation. Method: YAs and OAs completed an attention task during w...

Creativity research requires assessing the quality of ideas and products. In practice, conducting creativity research often involves asking several human raters to judge participants’ responses to creativity tasks, such as judging the novelty of ideas from the alternate uses task (AUT). Although such subjective scoring methods have proved useful, t...

Recent studies have provided insight into inter-individual differences in creative thinking, focusing on characterizations of distributed large-scale brain networks both at the local level of regions and their pairwise interactions and at the global level of the brain as a whole. However, it remains unclear how creative thinking relates to mesoscal...

Language production involves complex action sequencing to produce fluent speech in real-time, placing considerable constraints on working memory that lead to sequencing biases in production. Researchers have speculated that these biases may extend beyond language to other human behaviors involving action sequencing, but this claim has not been emp...

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...

Reflection—the activity of reasoning through an action that has occurred—has been shown to be of importance to the development of design expertise. Although design reflection has been widely studied previously, several gaps in the knowledge still exist. First, previous work in design reflection has been mostly limited to descriptive and prescriptiv...

Our author's Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State uses brain imaging and behavioral experiments to examine how creative thinking works in different contexts and domains, from the arts to the sciences to everyday life. His article examines the part of the brain that directs creative thought and asks the million-dollar question: Can...

Increasing amounts of behavioral and neuroscientific evidence support a view in which creativity arises as a result of an interaction between associative and executive processes (Beaty, Benedek, Silvia, & Schacter, 2016; Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek, 2014). Although much progress has been made in this area, the precise nature of the inte...

Are intelligence and creativity distinct abilities, or do they rely on the same cognitive and neural systems? We sought to quantify the extent to which intelligence and creative cognition overlap in brain and behavior by combining machine learning of fMRI data and latent variable modeling of cognitive ability data in a sample of young adults (N = 1...

In recent years, several studies have indicated that healthy older adults exhibit a reduction in task-unrelated thoughts compared to young adults. However, much less is known regarding age-related differences in time spent engaging in stimulus-independent thoughts or in their neural correlates in the absence of an ongoing task. In the current study...

Hemispheric lateralization for creative thinking remains a controversial topic. Early behavioral and neuroimaging research supported right hemisphere dominance in creative thinking, but more recent evidence suggests the left hemisphere plays an equally important role. In addition, the extent to which hemispheric lateralization in specific brain reg...

Creative thinking has long been associated with spreading of activation through concepts within semantic networks. Here we examine one potential influence on spreading activation known as the fan effect: increasing concept knowledge leads to increasing interference from related concepts. We tested whether cue association size-an index of semantic r...