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Keep Calm and Create On: Time-Frequency Exploration of Creative Ideation in the Native and Second Language
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Poster C24 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Guillaume Thierry1,2, Olga Witczak2, Iga Krzysik2, Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman2, Rafał Jończyk2; 1Bangor University, 2Adam Mickiewicz University
We need more creativity. Creativity gives hope, it solves problems, it finds ways out of crises, it progresses civilisation. Interest in the neuroscience of creativity has recently surged, with EEG studies showing increased alpha frequency power when people generate original as compared to unoriginal ideas. Also, creative individuals tend to display greater alpha power than less creative individuals. To our knowledge, no study to date has attempted to compare creative ideation across languages in bilinguals. Here, we used time-frequency analysis to explore brain oscillations patterns associated with ideation (divergent thinking) and idea selection (convergent thinking) in bilingual participants engaged in an adaptation of the Alternative Uses Task, which requires participants to provide novel, unusual, and plausible uses for everyday objects. Participants were tested in the native (L1 Polish) and the second (L2 English) language to investigate potential differences between languages in terms of creative output and underlying brain activity. Polish-English bilinguals (N=30) with high proficiency in English (C1-C2) engaged in three successive 30-second cycles of idea generation for a total of 20 items (ten per language), whilst EEG was recorded using a 64-channel BioSemi ActiveTwo system. Each trial started with the presentation of a prime object featuring an image and superimposed word (e.g., a hat). After typing in the object’s common use, a first ideation cycle started, at the end of which participants reported the most original / unusual use they had imagined for that object within that cycle. Preliminary analyses of 15 datasets revealed distinctive alpha and beta power modulations, both within and across cycles, but critically also between languages. As expected, alpha (8-12 Hz) power was particularly sustained throughout all ideation cycles in all participants, especially over right posterior electrodes, with a slight tendency to decrease over time within cycle and from one cycle to the next. There was no difference between languages in alpha power over time or across cycles. Strikingly, we found significant differences between languages in both the lower (18-20 Hz) and upper (26-30 Hz) beta ranges: Whereas beta power surged at the beginning of each cycle and sometimes reoccurred within a cycle in L1, the opposite trend applied in L2, where we observed wide-scale desynchronisation relative to baseline. Critically, this pattern applied not only to group-averaged results but also each of the participants considered individually. We interpret this result as showing that ideation in L1 requires monitoring of spreading of activation in a multidimensional semantic-associative space, whereas such process is likely scaled down in L2, and possibly less prone to spurious interference from irrelevant or competing mental representations. These results suggest that bilinguals engaging in creative ideation may experience less “cognitive stress” from the challenge set by the task in their second language.
Topic Areas: Morphology, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics