Talk 1: Creativity after stroke

(Nicole Göbel, Inselspital Bern)

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Creativity is a complex neuro-psycho-philosophical phenomenon. It is a multifaceted cognitive process rather than a specific cognition that requires different skills (cognitive and social) and can lead to new and useful ideas in various fields (e.g. arts, crafts, science).

However, it is unclear how creativity evolves after focal brain lesions. Brain injury is usually associated with a deterioration of cognitive functions. Nevertheless, it has been pointed out that positive changes such as phenomena associated with plasticity could be overlooked. The paradoxical facilitation approach, for example, states that a lesion in one brain region can lead to a reversal of inhibition to linked areas or to a compensatory functional enhancement of the ipsilesional site. This could result in a contra-intuitive improvement of the functions of the affected area.

To date, there is only a limited number of single-case studies, which have found that patients can become more creative after a focal brain lesion. However, it is virtually impossible to measure creativity as a non-confounded factor. Individual differences in brain damage and the associated symptoms have to be taken into account.

With the planned long-term study, patients are repeatedly measured over a one-year period post stroke. Insights could be gained into how acute brain injuries influence creativity. A creativity test battery will be used to investigate the development of patients' creative output over time. With extensive testing neurological and neuropsychological deficits will be identified.

The following research questions are to be clarified: 1) The role of the lesion side, whereby noticeable differences in creativity is expected, especially when the right hemisphere is affected; 2) Development of creativity over time, which will indicate the mechanisms behind it; 3) Whether creativity is a question of paradoxical facilitation or of plasticity and repair processes; 4) Furthermore, lesion symptom mapping will be carried out in order to correlate places of focal lesions with creative performance.

This research is relevant and useful, as creativity contributes greatly to patients' life satisfaction and their management of everyday life.

Since this study is still ongoing, we will give you an introduction to the field and present you some intermediary results.

Talk 2: Aiming for more objectivity in creativity assessment – Applying word vectors on creativity data

(Magdalena Camenzind, Inselspital Bern)

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Introduction: Divergent thinking (DT), as a compound of creativity, refers to an ability to produce multiple ideas to a given topic or various solutions to a given problem. A possible means to measure DT is the Associative Fluency Task (AFT) where participants are instructed to tell everything that comes to their minds once presented with a prompt word. The output of such DT tasks is typically assessed by the number of produced ideas (i.e., fluency), their frequency-based originality (i.e., originality) as well as their semantic proximity (i.e., flexibility). Whereas there are objective means to assess fluency and originality, flexibility is often subjectively rated, which is not only costly and labor intensive, but also influenced by inter-individual variations in the perception of semantic distances.

Aim: Therefore, the development of an objective, quantitative and sensitive measure of semantic distances and consequently of the flexibility of given answers is the aim of this project.

Methods: The semantic distances between words were quantified by applying word vectors of the German language that were trained on a large text corpus. The word vectors were adapted for the purpose of creativity assessment by building a more diverse text corpus for the training and by taking homonyms, synonyms, and compound words into account to circumvent context ambiguities.

Discussion/Outlook: The generated word vectors were applied on data from the AFT of 50 healthy subjects and flexibility was determined which shall be compared to human ratings and ratings extracted from GermaNet, a semantic network for the German language. First preliminary results indicate that the flexibility performances as assessed by the word vectors is more sensitive and importantly not confounded by the frequency of given answers. Overall, the developed measure has a great potential to objectively assess the output of DT tasks.