I am hoping to better understand the neuroscience of divergent versus convergent thinking as part of a creative process, so I am thinking of a block-design fmri study including divergent and convergent thinking tasks. Are there well-validated tasks that I could use?
Also appreciated any advice on scales to measure divergent and convergent thinking abilitites at baseline to group participants.
What I found so far in Benedek 2011 in Neuropsychologia, however, I am not sure if this task is managable and comparable with fMRI.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393211004106
A convergent and a divergent thinking task were employed, both of which were presented in two experimental conditions involving either low or high internal processing demands (2 × 2-within-subject design). The tasks were based on a stimulus set of 20 meaningful four-character words. In the convergent task participants were asked to find an anagram solution of the given stimulus word (e.g., for the stimulus word “POST” the solution would be “STOP”). The word class of the anagram was irrelevant, but participants had to use all four letters exactly once (e.g., “TOP” as solution for “POST” was incorrect). This task can be considered a convergent thinking task as there exists only a limited number of known correct solutions (usually just one per item; Guilford, 1967). In the divergent thinking task, participants were required to create an original but meaningful four-word sentence using the given four characters as initial letters (e.g., for the item “POST” a possible response would be “Oliver teaches Portuguese students”). As shown in the example, the order of the initial letters in the sentence could differ from the order of characters in the stimulus word, but every character had to be used exactly once. This task was derived from a well-known German creativity test (VKT, Schoppe, 1975) and can be considered as divergent thinking task since there are nearly unlimited possible solutions for every stimulus (Guilford, 1967).
Another option by Fink et al 2009:The Creative Brain: Investigation of Brain Activity During Creative Problem Solving by Means of EEG and fMRI
The following four tasks, each compris- ing eight test items, were presented in separate blocks. In the Alternative Uses (AU) task, participants had to think of unusual/original uses of conventional everyday objects such as a ‘‘tin’’ (example answers: ‘‘mirror’’, ‘‘exhaust for a car’’) or an ‘‘umbrella’’ (example answers: ‘‘boat for ani- mals’’, ‘‘epee’’). Unlike this, in the Object Characteristics (OC) task participants had to think of typical characteristics of conventional everyday objects such as ‘‘shoes’’ (example answers: ‘‘leathery’’, ‘‘matched’’) or ‘‘coat hook’’ (example answers: ‘‘wooden’’, ‘‘hanging’’). In the Name Invention (NI) task pairs of letters representing fictional abbreviations (such as ‘‘K M’’, ‘‘T S’’) were given to the participants and they had to invent as original names as possible that might belong to the given abbreviation (e.g., K M: ‘‘Kissing Man- ual’’, ‘‘Kaleidoscope Monster’’, T S: ‘‘Tissue Spender’’, ‘‘Time Saver’’). And finally, in the Word Ends (WE) task, German suffixes (‘‘-ung’’, ‘‘-nis’’) were presented that had to be com- pleted by the participants. Items of all four tasks were pre- sented alternately in a fixed sequence (AU1 - OC1 - NI1 - WE1, AU2 - OC2 - .. .). The item was displayed in the centre of the screen, a short instruction of the respective task given in the top part of the screen.
Article The Creative Brain: Investigation of Brain Activity During C...
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Neuroscience