SfNC . 12/9/24 SfNC . 12/9/24

How does engaging with the creative arts affect health and well-being?

Expert researchers share their latest findings and how to measure the relationship between creativity and well-being. Watch the recording on our member site.

Both laypeople and researchers often assume that engaging with and participating in the creative arts is inherently therapeutic, but what does the evidence actually say? How and under what conditions does creativity enhance our health, mood, social and emotional skills, and other outcomes?

In the panel “Measuring the Impact of the Creative Arts on Health and Other Outcomes”, co-hosted with APA Division 10 as part of SfNC’s Fall Creativity Symposium, expert researchers shared their latest findings, the lessons they’ve learned about how to best conduct rigorous studies in this area, and how we might all make use of creativity to improve well-being.

Jessica Hoffman (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence) shared how engaging with museums and creative activities can help children and adolescents develop emotional intelligence by teaching them how to perceive and label their emotions as valuable information that they can use to problem-solve.
Jennifer Drake (Brooklyn College CUNY) shared evidence that drawing for distraction can help both children and adults regulate emotions effectively and improve their mood, and highlighted how children are naturally predisposed to drawing as a way to deal with stress, which underscores its utility as a therapeutic practice.
Thalia Goldstein (George Mason University) highlighted how theater education can foster empathy, confidence and creative agency in participants, and how she and others are exploring how these developments may transfer to personal and social development in other domains.
Anjan Chatterjee (Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics) shared that while positive aesthetic experiences are beneficial for our well-being, there is also value potential value in aesthetic experiences that involve challenging emotions, such as fear or sadness. He shared that one of the urgent questions in this space is to explore the psychological conditions in which challenging or unpleasant aesthetic experiences can be constructive rather than aversive.

The panelists also discussed the nuances and inherent messiness of trying to operationalize well-being in the context of creativity, and shared what they’ve learned about how to navigate the practical and theoretical challenges involved, including:

The challenges and limitations of interpreting self-report measures and physiological recordings, especially across diverse age groups.
How to collaborate with stakeholders in this research - including schools, parents, teachers, organizations, and program managers by developing a shared vocabulary and clarity around goals.
The fact that outcomes can be highly contextual, often vary between groups, and how to find the signal in the noise over time.
The value of investing time and research efforts into improving measures for key social and emotional constructs to improve their validity and reliability.
The varied length and durability of the positive benefits seen via engagement with the arts, and the implications for how to structure interventions and follow-up.

SfNC members can access and re-watch the session recording at any time through our member site.

What Creativity is, and What it Isn’t

Human creativity is complex, messy, endlessly fascinating, and critically important – that’s why we’ve devoted our careers to understanding it. Its complexity raises considerable challenges in aligning on a shared vocabulary and common set of operational definitions. The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity has recently spearheaded a series of initiatives aimed at sharpening the concepts within creativity and clarifying their relationships, to increase the effectiveness of our research efforts and facilitate its application and understanding by the public. In this piece, we discuss the motivation for these initiatives, highlight progress to date, and introduce the two core projects currently underway that we believe will propel our field forward.

How SfNC is leading the field of creativity science in evolving, defining, and standardizing the semantics of creativity and its investigation.

The Challenge of Conceptualizing Creativity

As any field grows, different strands of research evolve independently as researchers use different operational definitions depending on their background, approach, and techniques. This diversity, while challenging, reflects the evolving nature of the discipline and its broadening scope. The neuroscience of creativity, now entering its 3rd decade, has, indeed, become diverse in scope and is growing rapidly in ambition and impact.

In addition to the normal growing pains of any new and expanding field of study, developing ontological and epistemological clarity across different strands of creativity research poses additional challenges due to the complexity of the neuro-cognitive processes involved in creative thought and the wide array of biological, behavioral, and psycho-social factors that contribute to these processes. Though SfNC’s aim is primarily to understand the neural basis of creativity, doing so effectively involves considering the many contexts in which creativity occurs, and requires communication and collaboration between scholars who study creativity through different lenses (e.g. clinical, arts, education, psycho-social, humanist, industrial-organizational, etc.) so that our efforts are complementary instead of redundant or incompatible.

In recent years, other disciplines in the psychological and brain sciences have addressed similar semantic and ontological discrepancies through directed consensus-building among peer scientists (e.g., the Cognitive Ontology Project). SfNC recognizes the necessity for convergence among creativity researchers as a sign of our field's maturation and a challenge we’re eager to address. Achieving definitional clarity across the neuroscience of creativity will enable faster research progress and facilitate communication within the scientific community and between researchers, employers, educators, innovation stakeholders, and the general public.

In 2019, the SfNC Executive Committee designated this issue as a top priority and set out several strategic efforts to push this project forward. These efforts include inquiries into the theories, constructs, and operational definitions of creativity. The first initiative was endorsed by SfNC and completed in collaboration with other leaders in this space and the broader community of peer creativity researchers.

Initial Project: Developing a Neurally-Informed Ontology of Creativity Measurement

Our first project was an exploration of the fit between the constructs used in creativity research and the tasks used to operationalize these constructs, through a neuroscientific lens. To do so, we generated models of creativity-relevant cognitive constructs based on behavioral data by querying expert creativity researchers (including SfNC members). We then used NeuroSynth to generate meta-analytic models of the neural activity that corresponded to those cognitive constructs. We generated separate neural models based on meta-analyses of individual experimental tasks that are commonly used to represent those same constructs in the neuroscience of creativity literature. By comparing the expert-driven NeuroSynth models of creativity-related constructs to the meta-analyses of experimental tasks in creativity research, we were able to examine how well the tasks used in creativity neuroscience corresponded to the underlying neurocognitive constructs they purport to measure.

This project, published in Kenett et al. (2020), demonstrated proof of concept for leveraging neuroimaging to help determine which sets of tasks best capture a target set of constructs. Some constructs, such as cognitive control, novelty, and divergent thinking, align well with the neural data, while others show weaker correlations. As more detailed and larger datasets become available, this method has potential to refine the choice of constructs the field uses to define creativity, as well as the choice of tasks used to measure those constructs in the brain and behavior.

Current Initiatives: Definitions of Creativity Constructs and their Theoretical Relations

SfNC’s Executive Committee, in collaboration with other major creativity science societies (APA Division 10 and ISSCI), has recently launched two ambitious and extensive initiatives. These two projects aim to develop consensus definitions and ontological clarity around creativity by leveraging a large number of expert voices that represent the diversity of perspectives, approaches, demographics, and geographies in our field. They use distinct yet complementary methodologies, and thus, together, provide a basis from which we may move forward together.

The Creativity Definitions Consensus Project (hereafter: the “ Definitions Consensus Project”)

Led by Evangelia G. Chrysikou and Yoed N. Kenett

About the Project

The Definitions Consensus project aims to produce a cutting-edge consensus paper on the definitions of key constructs that drive creativity research at this point in time. This project will use a “bottom-up” approach to resolve ambiguity and reach consensus definitions for what we mean when we use specific terms in creativity research. The Definitions Consensus project will generally follow the Delphi method for achieving consensus among a group of experts, following recent relevant examples in other fields in cognitive psychology (e.g., semantic memory, visual distraction, and action control).

Approach

Phase 1: Creativity researchers (defined as individuals with faculty positions at a university or center, whose primary research interest is creativity) will be invited to participate as co-authors. These criteria mimic the approach taken by other fields that have produced multi-authored papers, like physics or biology. Our aim is to involve about 70 creativity researchers from around the world.

Phase 2: Invitees who agree to participate will be provided with a list of 25-30 constructs and will be asked to vote on the completeness and appropriateness of the list for inclusion of the constructs in the project. A calibration of the list will be performed, as needed, with the removal of low-agreement constructs and the addition of missing constructs.

Phase 3: In small groups of 2-3 individuals, participants will be assigned to develop a definition for a randomly selected construct. The definitions should be no longer than 500 words, plus references, as needed.

Phase 4: The project leads will combine all responses and the full group of project participants will participate in a voting process where they will weigh in on all definitions, stating their agreement and/or suggesting edits to each definition. The full list of definitions will be recalibrated as needed, and groups may rework their definitions following the voting and feedback phase.

Phase 5: A second voting process will take place following re-calibration, where the goal is to reach ~85-90% agreement within the full group on each definition. Anyone who has a fundamental irreconcilable difference with the majority definition will craft a dissent, which will be included with the construct's definition and percent agreement.

Outcome

The Definitions Consensus project leads will develop the paper and all participants will be co-authors who’ll get the chance to review and edit the draft prior to submission for publication in a major journal. The final product will be a consensus paper on the definitions of key constructs in creativity research circa 2024-2025, including any remaining definitional issues noted in dissents, that will support and propel future research.

Figure 1. A possible representation of the outcome of the Creativity Consensus Definitions Project, showing key creativity-related concepts and their formal definitions as co-authored by groups of experts through a collaborative peer-review process.

The Creativity Ontology Project (hereafter: the “Ontology Project”)

Led by Adam E. Green and James C. Kaufman

About the Project

The overall objective of this project is to develop a formal ontology for creativity and creativity-related constructs, with the ultimate goal of helping researchers within and across areas of creativity research communicate, collaborate, and use meaningful equivalencies and distinctions in their scholarship. The project is structured to identify points of convergence in how a global set of leading creativity researchers understand the meanings of core creativity constructs. Specifically, the project identifies the component terms that are the most definitionally essential to each construct.

The outcome will be a clear reference for 1) the namable components that are most essential to the meaning of core creativity constructs, and 2) the namable similarities and differences between these constructs. In its simplest form, this will be distilled to a straightforward table of terms that can be easily understood by both experts and newcomers to creativity. More nuanced metrics and data visualizations will support additional insights, but the primary goal is to provide a simple and effective reference for understanding and directly comparing core constructs in creativity.
Approach

This project has two main aims. The first aim is to parse and understand separate meanings of the term, “creativity”: 1) creativity as process, 2) creativity as the attribute of a product, and 3) creativity as the attribute of a person/agent. For each of these meanings, we seek to identify terms that are the most definitionally essential – the component processes most essential for creativity, the attributes most essential to the creativity of a product, and the attributes most essential to the creativity of a person. In a multi-phase study, a large and broadly representative group of creativity expert authors will be invited to generate candidate terms, weigh in on groupings and omissions, and then ultimately rate them on the extent to which they are central to each meaning of creativity (process, attribute of product, attribute of person/agent).

The second aim of the project is to identify distinctions and commonalities between creativity and other expert-selected constructs that are frequently used interchangeably with creativity (whether they should be or not!). We will start by focusing on creativity as a process (and likewise focus on the other selected constructs as processes).

Critically, these similarities and differences will be clearly identified in the form of expert-generated words, as opposed to maps or other graphic/visual representations and metrics as are commonly used in formal ontology tables. Though graphic/visual representations have great value, our goal is to offer a clear and jargon-free presentation of nameable distinctions and commonalities. This approach can enable simple and direct comparisons and contrasts between the constructs, allowing many possible applications for research, theory, and practice.

Outcome

This project will result in a manuscript featuring easily-referenced tables of terms that reflect the combined input of the broad set of creativity expert authors invited to participate in the project. Critically, these tables will represent the nameable overlaps and distinctions between creativity-relevant constructs. For example, looking across columns for constructs such as creativity, imagination, and innovation will readily show which components these constructs have in common and which ones are distinct. Component terms in each column will be ordered by how essential they are to the construct at the top of the column (based on the responses from the expert authors). Thus, it will be possible to see not only the components that overlap between constructs but the differences/similarities in how essential these components are to respective constructs. It will also be possible to compare the component terms to each other by looking at the construct columns (and positions within columns) in which the expert opinions place them.

NOTE: In the table below, the constructs and components shown here were generated quasi-randomly and are for demonstration purposes only. This example table is abbreviated (the actual table will be more complete — we anticipate it will include 10 components for each of six constructs).

Figure 2. A possible representation of an ontology table for creativity-related constructs that will result from the Ontology Project. The construct columns will represent core creativity-related constructs identified with the greatest convergence by the field-wide group of authors. Each column will list approximately 10 components that receive convergent endorsements for that construct. Components will be ordered based on the group's ratings of how essential each component is to each construct (with means and standard deviations shown). Colors will be used to highlight components that appear for multiple constructs. Uncolored cells will indicate components that are unique to one construct. This will allow a quick visual scan of the overlaps and distinctions between constructs. The goal is to convey 1) the namable components that are most essential to the meaning of each construct, and 2) the namable similarities and differences between these constructs.

Next Steps and Future Directions

We’re excited to share that our Definitions Consensus Project and Ontology Project are actively underway. These initiatives are crucial steps toward refining the definitions and frameworks of creativity and creativity-related constructs. Over the coming months, we will keep the community updated on the progress and findings from these projects.

We will also continue to be involved in the design and implementation of other ontology projects, such as those within the NeuroArts space. Our aim is to enhance collaboration and clarity in creativity research and its related fields, ultimately benefiting both scientific understanding and its wide application. We hope that the results of these projects will help frame comprehensive theoretical models of creativity, develop a standardized toolkit for researchers in this space, and raise the overall level of scientific rigor and translation for applications.

SfNC . 6/10/24 SfNC . 6/10/24

Current Innovations and Future Trends in Neuroscience of Creativity: Views from Three Experts

Indre Viskontas, Yoed Kenett, and Adam Green are heavy hitters in the neuroscience of creativity, and they each have very different approaches, areas of expertise, and perspectives.

**Indre Viskontas**
University of San Francisco

**Yoed Kenett**
Technion Israel Institute of Technology

At SfNC2024, we asked them to share their views on the state of our field, the research directions and methods they’re most excited about, and what they think are the most important questions we should be focusing on in creativity science going forward. They also offered their best advice for trainees and early-career researchers.

Though they sometimes disagreed on the specifics (or at least pretended to), we came away from the session with tons of great insights about where to focus our attention to make progress in our discipline and so many reasons to be excited about the future.

Question 1: What do you think is the biggest gap in our current understanding of creativity? And what do you think the next big question is for our field to address that would have the biggest impact?

Indre: I think the next big thing for our field is the need to talk about creativity in the way that laypeople think of it, which is very much tied to the arts: whether it’s visual art, or performing art, or music, etc. We should be answering questions about what it means to be professionally creative, and we need to frame and communicate this in a way that’s relevant to creative professionals and anyone who consumes creative products in these domains.

We need to turn our attention to applying neuroscience to answering some of the fundamental questions that people in the arts are interested in, such as how to get more people to visit cultural institutions and patronize the arts? How can we help performers be better at their job? How can we help people see the creative arts as something fundamental to education, health, and wellness so that it’s consistently funded in schools?

I’m involved in the NeuroArts movement, and right now we’re in this zeitgeist moment where there’s a lot of interest in the intersection of neuroscience and the arts. But of course attention spans are limited, so if we don’t prove that neuroscience research is meaningful to them in some way, we’re going to lose this opportunity and they’re going to move on to something else.

Adam: First off, I want to reflect on the fact that the purpose of SfNC is exactly this – to identify and coordinate how to fill these gaps. When SfNC was started 9, 10 years ago, our goal at the time was to unify the disparate research going on so that we could form a coherent field. And now we’re at a point where it’s even possible for us to recognize priorities that we should systematically tackle together. We’re now talking about things in a unified space.

But to answer your question, I think we need more detail. We talk about “creativity” in a general sense, but in order to make progress, particularly with enhancing creativity, we need to be able to parse the different components of what we mean by creativity in different contexts as they relate to the outcomes we care about.

For example, we know that being creative is helpful in STEM domains, but it’s very difficult to actually make use of or improve creativity in STEM if we don’t know what aspects of creativity actually matter and how to influence them. Right now we measure “creativity” at different points in education: how it goes up or down in different years of schooling, or at different ages, or in different school districts, or countries. But the more difficult question that we should prioritize is how can we integrate creativity into curricula, that is – how can we plan and train for creativity in a deliberate way, and help students learn how to be creative as a mode of approaching whatever it is that they’re studying. That’s a huge gap right now, and it requires a more specific parsing of the components of creativity we’re trying to influence through STEM education.

The second gap I see is that, if we’re going to understand how to improve creativity at the neural level, the details of the individual matter. Something that’s confusing us now is that although we have a basic mapping of some of the neural circuitries and architecture involved in creativity, when we try to intervene on the brain to influence it such as through neuromodulation, neurofeedback, etc., the results tend to be somewhat muddy. And that’s because what we’re seeing at the group level doesn’t necessarily tell us very much about how individual brains operate. We need real-time and individuated biomarkers.

The last thing is that we need to stop talking about novelty and utility so much as the only things that matter for creativity. They describe the desired outcomes for creative products, not the creative process, and what we’re actually studying a lot of the time in the neuroscience of creativity is the creative process as humans do it. [see this recent paper by Adam & Yoed in CRJ on the process definition of creativity]

Yoed: The first huge gap I see is that the term creativity is holding us back. In classes I teach on creativity, I try to get my students to stop using the term creativity because it’s too abstract and too coarse. We need to break this concept apart and then put the pieces of the puzzle back together in new ways so we can create new terminology and a new understanding of how it relates to and describes so many different things.

The second thing that I think is critical to address is how context changes creativity. We tend to ignore context in the lab, but it has a huge influence on what creativity looks like in any given situation as well as the cognitive processes involved.

The last thing I think is critical to consider is domain-specificity and domain-generality in creativity. So far, we’ve tended to focus on general common mechanisms involved in creativity, such as thinking and memory, etc. Now we should be interested in more fine-tuned mechanisms that may differ in different forms of creativity, and in different contexts. Understanding the more domain-specific and context-specific processes that are brought to bear in different kinds of creative activity will also help us develop better ways to enhance creativity through behavioral interventions and tools like neuromodulation.

Question 2: If you had unlimited grant funding, millions of dollars, and infinite budget to pay research assistants and participants, how would you approach studying these big questions. In other words, what is your dream project?

Yoed: My aim would be to do population-level creativity assessment. We now have so many tools to access so many people, such as through crowd-sourcing. Why are we still collecting 50 subject samples? We could be measuring ten million people across diverse ages, countries, languages, cultures, and levels of education. At this point it’s clear how we could collect much, much larger samples, we’d just need the money to make it happen.

Adam: Yoed went macro, I’m going to go micro and say that I think it would be fascinating to work with a group of individuals long enough to figure out the individual susceptibility of different brains to different neural interventions. We could more accurately figure out whether and why different forms of stimulation, to different sites in the brain, during different tasks, are more effective for different individuals. If we did this in a systematic way and collected enough data from enough subjects, I bet that what we’d find is that there are a few reliable categories or sets of neural profiles for creativity that would really help guide our neural and cognitive theorizing.

Indre: So while Adam’s lab is testing a few people long enough to figure out their individual neuro types, I’m going back to the macro, which for me would involve figuring out how we can optimize the joy and feeling of self-actualization that happens when we experience a great work of creativity or when we create ourselves. Where does that joy come from? It’s similar to flow but it goes beyond flow. It’s about that soul-feeding nature of creativity that reminds us that we are individual beings that matter.

The way I’d go about this is by doing a longitudinal study with a bunch of different interventions, such as producing art or interacting with different forms art in various ways, etc., and I’d track how different people respond to these different interventions over time so we can figure out exactly under which conditions this “soul-feeding” happens. This could help us maximize human flourishing and well-being even in the dystopian all-virtual world we seem to be heading towards.

Question 3: Now given realistic constraints, what do you think are some things that we could all be doing right now, going forward, that would improve how we study creativity, even if it’s just tweaking our approach or changing our perspective on some issue? What methods or tasks should we be using (or stop using) to do better science? Basically, what I’m trying to say is: when are we going to stop asking people how many uses they can think of for a brick?

Adam: One thing we are just starting to tap into is the value of creativity assessment as a tool for measuring potential in education. A really exciting and appealing aspect of using creativity assessment in schools is that we can show that creativity predicts future performance and is much less associated with factors like race and socioeconomic status than traditional performance metrics.

Another promising area to focus on is identifying real-time neural markers of different creative brain states. For example, I’m thinking of Yuhua Yu’s work showing how differences in EEG spectral power volatility can predict whether someone will go on to solve a problem insightfully or analytically a few seconds later. Biomarkers like that are great because they’re a cheap, practicable way to identify in real-time when individuals are being more creative or have the potential to be creative based on their brain state. We can use biomarkers like that to improve the efficacy of our behavioral or neural interventions aimed at improving creativity in real time.

Yoed: One thing that I’m really pushing for is the standardization of creativity assessment and scoring through quantification. I believe that quantitative science is better science. Recently we’re seeing many new models and initiatives being developed for automatic scoring of creativity, many coming from Roger Beaty’s lab. These are all important breakthroughs and very promising, though right now they all focus narrowly on quantifying whether some creative product is novel and appropriate. Going forward we should also aim to include other dimensions of creativity and think about how to automatically quantify aspects not just of creative products but also of the creative process, person, etc.

Lastly, I agree that we need to move towards more individualized markers of creativity but also to identify dynamic markers of creativity over time. This may involve developing more advanced methods to study the brain as it engages in creative activity over time.

Indre: I’ll give a plug for equity. We often don’t make our studies accessible to those who have disabilities or those who are neurodivergent. We should be thinking about creating tools that are more equitable by working with people who are part of these communities. I think we’re missing out on understanding a lot of the ways that the brain is creative because we’re failing to include different types of brains in our samples and we’re not making equity a central tenet of how we conduct research.

Question 4: You all mentor students and have trainees, and a big part of what the Society does is provide a platform and serve as a professional network to help develop the future scholars in our field. What advice do you have for trainees at the beginning or early stages of their career for what the future looks like?

Indre: While we may not go into academia for the money, I think it’s important to be able to predict where the money is going to be 5 or 10 years from now, and I think it’s safe to say that it might not all be from government institutions, especially outside the US. There are lots of private companies, tech companies, etc., who looking to invest in creativity. That money is probably going to dwarf the amount of funding that we can get from public institutions. Further, we simply know that there aren’t going to be enough professor jobs for everyone graduating with a PhD right now, but there’s going to be a huge need for PhD scientists out in the world. So thinking strategically, you might consider how your work could make an impact in private industries. Most of these companies at least profess to want to make the world a better place, it’s not just about the bottom line. So as you move through your training, you might want to think about how you could position yourself and your research to make a difference in those areas.

Adam: I’m going to disagree (or at least pretend to) because although there’s a lot that’s true about what you just said, I think it’s important for the soul of our field to make sure we show students that there’s still a path forward in academia. In my lab we collaborate with a lot of private sector companies, and it’s not that it can’t be a great path for students to take. These companies do say they want to make the world a better place, they’re interested in the ideas and they’re excited by the research, but it still has to go somewhere that’s profitable. That’s not a value judgment. It’s just to say that if the academic side of our field is swallowed up, we will lose a lot of the best ideas and the motivation of our talent. So, for the sake of our trainees I think we need to model that there’s a path forward in academia (and there is) and encourage and support them to pursue that path.

Yoed: I also actually slightly disagree with both of you, because I think the future is very bright. From the time since I started my PhD, it’s amazing how far we’ve come. I think this is the best time to be in this field.

My advice is that since creativity is a complex and multidimensional construct, focusing on developing multidisciplinary skills is what can bring an edge to your research and how you’re positioned. I’d encourage trainees to develop a range of technical and research skills such as computational modeling and programming, etc., but also being able to converge and synthesize your skills across empirical, cognitive, and computational perspectives in academia and industry. Another thing is being aware of the tidal wave of AI that may overwhelm us all. The people who’ll be able to use AI in creative ways and ride that wave, to use it as a tool to increase the complexity of your results are going to be most successful, and that’s where I think the future of jobs is heading towards.

“You’re also right” “Well, you’re *also* right!”

If there’s one thing all three panelists agreed on, it’s that the future of the neuroscience of creativity looks very promising indeed. SfNC members can watch the full panel recording on CrowdCast.

SfNC . 5/15/24 SfNC . 5/15/24

Creativity & Design: A Retrospective

SfNC2024: Creativity & Design took place in Toronto last month. Our aim was to deepen the ties between the creativity and design fields and examine key theoretical and methodological challenges in studying creativity in and outside of the lab.

Design is creativity embodied and extended in time and space and is usually more complex than the tasks we use to model creative processes when using neuroscience methods. In Toronto, we heard from leaders in the field about the opportunities and challenges of studying creativity in the context of design and were inspired by the calls to action to do so.

Now, after some much-needed incubation, we wanted to share some key insights and highlight what we learned about the intersection of creativity and design – and the resulting opportunities to advance the work we do together.

Opportunity abounds: designers want to know how our research can help them, and design researchers want to collaborate

The keynote addresses by Kosa Goucher-Lambert (UC Berkeley) and Upali Nanda (HKS, University of Michigan) anchored the conference and offered two very different perspectives on the interaction between creativity and design. Most importantly, both emphasized how much opportunity there is to build bridges between our community of academic researchers and professionals who practice design (e.g. designers, architects, engineers, etc.)

Upali Nanda, PhD on designing for well-being and creativity for professional designers

“…there is a bridge that is missing between the work that is being done in the scientific community and the industry that is investing in creativity and creating products and designs from it. If nothing else happens today, if we never meet again, know that bridge building is the primary thing we can do here together and what I hope we achieve.”

- Upali Nanda, April 12, 2024

Upali Nanda, (Global Sector Director, Innovation and Partner) at HKS and University of Michigan gave an exhilarating talk on how HKS is learning how to design for creativity and well-being both for their clients and for themselves as a design firm.

As one of the world’s largest and most influential architecture and design firms, HKS’s purpose is to design and create innovative built environments that achieve their desired function, while also promoting the health, creativity, and well-being of the people who use those spaces. Delivering on these enormous design projects also requires tremendous creativity on the part of HKS’s professional designers, architects, and engineers. Upali and her stakeholders recognize that promoting brain health and mental well-being are critical to supporting their creative workforce. Even though creativity is more important than ever to achieving the firm’s goals, there’s a gap between the promises of what they could develop through their creative efforts, and what designers are actually able to achieve given that today’s working conditions are often inconducive to creativity.

Upali explained how HKS recently engaged in a partnership with the Center for Brain Health at UT Dallas to educate their workforce with empirically-driven work strategies to operate at a higher level of effectiveness, such as how to limit multi-tasking, how to choose the best physical and social environment to work in depending on the task, and how to plan and prioritize one’s workday effectively. They are now in the process of re-developing their work environments at their physical offices to align with these insights.

Upali also presented the results of a survey about creativity that she administered to some of the firm’s best designers. She found that although the professional designers at HKS mostly don’t have a formal understanding of creativity science, they’re knowledgeable about their own needs and creative practices and are eager to understand more about what research on human creativity can offer them. It turns out that they have many of the same questions we do about creativity, such as:

- Can creativity be learned, trained, or improved?

- Does stress improve creativity or hinder it?

- Can specific environmental or cognitive interventions enhance creativity?

- What is the ideal amount of time to devote to working on a creative task?

Upali’s talk left us all inspired to build these bridges so that our research can have a greater impact on the stakeholders in design professions who may most benefit from it.

Kosa Goucher-Lambert on the frontiers of design neurocognition

“There’s so much possibility for cross-pollination between the design research community and the creativity community and I think we have a lot to learn from one another and share with each other. Our work in design research has been amplified by the interactions that I’ve had with you and I hope that you can see design as an interesting test bed for some of the problems you’re working on.”

- Kosa Goucher-Lambert, April 11, 2024

In his keynote address, Kosa Goucher-Lambert presented a snapshot of what it actually looks like to research design neurocognition. Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, Kosa has turned his curiosity to understanding how the engineering design process unfolds and how it can be optimized. The main goals of the Co-Design lab which he directs at UC Berkeley are to understand the mechanisms that allow humans and computers to excel at design tasks and to develop the next generation of methods and tools to improve designer behavior and creative problem solving.

Schematic of the Engineering Design Process presented by Dr. Goucher-Lambert, highlighting the Conceptual Design phase where most of the creative cognitive processes we study are brought to bear.

Most of this work is focused on the initial conceptual development phase of the larger design process, rather than the subsequent embodiment or detail design phases. Kosa explained that though creativity is required throughout the design process, this phase is where it is concentrated and where many of the creative sub-processes that we study in the (neuro)science of creativity are brought to bear, such as idea generation, analogical reasoning, and fixation effects. His lab’s approach often involves engaging in one or several tightly controlled lab experiments before implementing and studying those effects in more naturalistic design situations using tasks and tools that engineering designers would normally engage with.

One of the main research goals of his lab going forward is the development and use of computational tools such as extended reality, computational models, and LLMs to enhance creativity in design.

Kosa concluded his keynote address by emphasizing how the Co-Design Lab’s work is only possible because of the collaborations between individuals with expertise in engineering, design, cognitive neuroscience, creativity, and computer science, and much opportunity there is for creativity scientists to make an impact on design research through such collaborations.

Beyond the keynotes, the rest of the conference was filled with important insights and emerging themes. Here are some that stuck out to us the most:

2. Our field may be mature enough to move (thoughtfully) beyond a reductionist approach

A major theme of the conference that was addressed during the Creativity & Design Panel on Day 1 was how to balance the methodological rigor required in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology with the complexity and ambiguity of the design process. Evangelia Chrysikou (Drexel University) suggested that just as how in the early 20th century, behaviorist approaches were considered necessary to establish the objectivity of early psychological science, our present reductionist approaches to examining creativity were a necessary and salient goal for the field 5, 10, or 20 years ago, when the (neuro)science of creativity was still in its infancy and researchers were focused on establishing it as a legitimate field in the natural sciences. Though we shouldn’t abandon precision, our field may now be mature enough to (thoughtfully) move beyond discrete cognitive tasks because our foundations have been well established (thanks to the accumulation of decades of rigorous scholarship!)

The need to extend our scope was also highlighted by John Gero (University of North Carolina), who explained that the behaviors and products of design cannot simply be understood as the sum of a series of tasks and cognitive processes. Rather, it is emergent, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Understanding the cognitive building blocks of design is critical, but so is understanding how they interact when they are combined and extended in naturalistic settings.

3. How a creative idea or design is evaluated matters a lot

Another theme from the Creativity & Design panel was how much opportunity there may be in deepening our understanding of how creative ideas and designs are evaluated by the brain.

**Sarah Rodriguez-Moreno** presenting her talk *Creativity Involves the Subjective Valuation of Ideas by the Brain’s Reward System* (Talk Session 1)

Dirk Bernhardt-Walther (University of Toronto), who studies neuroaesthetics, highlighted how similar the processes involved in evaluating creative ideas and products are to how we make aesthetic judgments. This aligns with recent research by Sarah Moreno-Rodriguez (Paris Brain Institute) whose talk supported the notion that, contrary to current theories, the evaluation phase of the creative process doesn’t only recruit executive processes involved in assessment such as the executive control network, but also the brain’s subjective valuation system. Her study also found that individual differences in the degree to which people weigh novelty vs. originality in their liking judgments are related to differences in creative abilities and patterns of neural activation at rest and during creativity tasks. This perspective may shed light on the inherent subjectivity of creative evaluation and pose new questions about the contributions of metacognitive and reward-related processes to creativity.

How ideas and designs are evaluated during design processes is important because design, more so than the open-ended creativity tasks we use in the lab, often has to satisfy many practical and social constraints. These constraints may be known at the outset but can also change over the course of a project (and often do!). The ultimate success of a design concept depends on how many different contributors and stakeholders with varying needs, sensibilities, and preferences evaluate the work.

4. The time dimension is under-explored in creativity research

Gero also argued that time is one of the most important dimensions in design research that’s usually overlooked by cognitive scientists. Design is non-monotonic (or non-linear) and unfolds over longer periods of time than typical creativity tasks - and some of the most important parts of the design process occur at points beyond initial ideation. He also presented a talk (Let’s Talk Design Symposium, Day 2) about time-of-day effects on the creative design process and how these effects may interact with education (e.g., industrial designers vs. engineers) to influence creative outcomes in design.

5. Studying design offers tasks and methods for creativity beyond the AUT, and introduces more factors to consider

While tried-and-true lab tasks such as the AUT still make up a large part of our research output, design research offers a whole range of new tasks and problems to leverage to study creativity. Creativity researchers looking for new, more ecologically valid tasks may look to design research for ways to prompt and measure creativity even outside the context of design. Using design as a model also reveals other factors that influence creativity in the real world, such as what happens when designers are forced to rethink or re-conceptualize a solution after feedback, or when constraints and needs change as a project progresses.

Using standardized creativity tasks like the AUT are useful for us because for the most part, anyone can do them. On the other hand, using more complex or specialized design tasks can introduce the possibility that educational background, experience, and personality traits have a significant influence on how individuals approach them and how creative their solutions are. These factors need to be controlled for, but understanding how these individual differences impact creativity is also extremely useful. For example, industrial designers and engineers are educated very differently and are trained to achieve different outcomes. Whether or not creativity is valuable in a solution can differ tremendously depending on their goals. For example, maybe you don’t want quality control engineers to propose risky creative solutions…but you do expect creativity from product designers.

6. The big priorities for creativity & design research range in methods from experimental psychology, to cognitive neuroscience, to applied human-computer interactions

During the Design & Creativity panel, the experts offered their perspective on what the next big priorities are in this discipline, and we were struck by the diversity of their answers.

Kosa Goucher-Lambert (UC Berkeley) talked about the exciting opportunities to study how human-computer interactions influence design creativity, and said that among the most urgent research priorities towards that goal is the “(mis)alignment problem” between AIs and humans in terms of how they store, access, and make relational inferences about semantic information. As human-AI collaborations become more common, how computational models determine how various objects and ideas are similar, different, or novel in terms of semantics, form, or function will influence the inferences and suggestions they make and by extension, the quality of the human’s creative solutions. His lab is actively working towards understanding the divide between computational models and humans with the goal of closing that alignment gap. This direction complements the ongoing work of scholars in our field, notably Janet Rafner, Roger Beaty, John Patterson, James Lloyd-Cox, and many others. We know that the application of AI and computational tools to creativity will continue to be a hot topic in creativity science (and was the topic of last year’s SfNC conference!).

Li Shu (University of Toronto) said that from her perspective, a significant priority for design research is continuing to understand the nature of fixation effects in design. Fixation effects during creative problem solving have long been a topic of study in experimental cognitive psychology, yet there is still so much we don’t know about the factors that influence fixation during reasoning and approaching ill-structured problems. This research is critical for the development of processes, strategies, and tools for designers, which can either hinder and limit the scope of their solutions or promote expansive, successful ideation and problem-solving.

Throughout the conference, researchers presented work on design and cognition that spanned many different methodologies and disciplines, ranging from neurofeedback with fNIRS, EEG and fMRI studies of neural states during design tasks, behavioral manipulations and interventions, and evaluation of team-based design creativity. It appears that there are as many ways to study design as there are to study creativity!

Cheers to a Successful Conference!

We were so impressed and inspired by the variety of talks, presentations, and research posters presented at SfNC2024. While we can’t highlight each one, we want to encourage all of our members to (re)watch the talk sessions and keynotes on CrowdCast if you missed any.

Special shout-out and congratulations to the winners of the Best Talk Award (Theophile Bieth, Paris ICM) and Best Poster Awards: Clin Lai (Penn State University) and Josie Friedman (University of Minnesota). Thank you to everyone who made SfNC2024 so special! Cheers!

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If you attended in person, online, or not at all, please consider completing the feedback survey below so we can learn and plan for next year!

SFNC2024 Feedback and planning survey

SfNC . 4/4/24 SfNC . 4/4/24

The Case for Creativity & Design: Digging into the "Why" of the SfNC 2024 Conference Theme

What can we learn about the basic mechanisms of human creativity by studying design? Are the goals and approaches used in design research aligned with those in our discipline? How can we bring these areas of research closer together, to make the science of creativity more ecologically valid and to ground design research in the psychological sciences?

In this feature, SfNC President Evangelia G. Chrysikou explains her interest in the cognitive neuroscience of design and why we decided to make the interaction between design and creativity the theme of this year’s annual meeting.

For the April feature, we’re diving into the big themes and questions motivating this year’s conference, such as:

What can we learn about the basic mechanisms of human creativity by studying design?
Are the goals and approaches used in design research aligned with those in our discipline?
How can we bring these areas of research closer together, to make the science of creativity more ecologically valid and to ground design research in the psychological sciences?

Below, SfNC President Evangelia G. Chrysikou explains her interest in the cognitive neuroscience of design and why we decided to make the interaction between design and creativity the theme of this year’s annual meeting. Be sure to also check out our suggested reading list of topical recently published work on design cognition!

Why Creativity & Design?

The term design conjures up many different associations—architecture, engineering, fashion, art. But the process of design can also apply to creating a college curriculum, a legal strategy, a board game, or a scientific conference schedule. Designing refers to the cognitive act of intentionally generating something new that can have an impact on the world in some unique and measurable way. Although professional designers exist across disciplines, design is a universal activity, performed in numerous situations by virtually everyone.

As an inherently generative practice, design encompasses many of the cognitive processes (e.g., memory, attention, cognitive control) that are central to creative thinking. But design is a complex, real-world activity rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience labs, despite its potential to revolutionize our approach to creativity research. Our desire to close this gap is why we’ve organized SfNC2024 around the theme of Creativity & Design.

The (neuro)science of creativity has a lot to gain from studying the design process—and cutting-edge neuroscience approaches to the study of the mind (e.g., functional neuroimaging, fNIRS, EEG) can now be used in conjunction with behavioral methods to capture how design unfolds in space and time. The kind of dynamic cognitive act that designing represents is a cornerstone of human creativity that can be enhanced or impeded by many factors (e.g., design fixation). Thus, leveraging methodological advances and theoretical perspectives from cognitive neuroscience in the study of design holds strong potential for advancing a comprehensive understanding of creative thinking at multiple levels of analysis.

This year's conference theme aims to unite global, interdisciplinary scientific communities interested in creativity research and its societal impact. While design science has evolved through cognitive and behavioral approaches, the role of creativity in design studies is often overlooked. Investigating the cognitive and neural bases of creative thinking within design contexts promises to enrich the study of design and its many social, clinical, and educational applications at a global scale.

Our fields have already recognized the gaps that exist between our disciplines and the promises of greater cross-talk. Collaborations are underway between cognitive neuroscientists, design scientists, and practitioners. At SfNC2024, our aim is to deepen the ties between the creativity and design fields and examine key theoretical and methodological challenges in studying creativity in and outside of the lab.

What can the neuroscience of creativity learn by studying the design process? How can the findings from the creativity laboratory advance design research and practice? Why is creativity central to both fields? We look forward to seeing you in Toronto (or virtually on Crowdcast) to discuss these and many more exciting questions next week!

Evangelia G. Chrysikou, Ph.D.

President, SfNC

Associate Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences - Drexel University

Research Spotlight On: SfNC2024 Keynote Speakers Upali Nanda & Kosa Goucher-Lambert

In our first installment of Creative Currents for 2024, we’d like to shine a spotlight on SfNC2024 keynote speakers Upali Nanda, PhD and Kosa Goucher-Lambert, PhD. Dr. Nanda and Dr. Goucher-Lambert are renowned experts on the application of research on human cognition and well-being to the enhancement of creativity and innovation in design. We learned so much from them at SfNC2024: Creativity & Design. Members can watch the keynote recordings on our member page.

Dr. Upali Nanda is EVP and Global Sector Director for Innovation at HKS, an international architectural firm where she oversees a range of innovation practices that work within, through and beyond the built environment for meaningful impact. Prior to her current role she served as the global research director for the firm and as the Executive Director for the non-profit Center for Advanced Design Research and Education. Dr. Nanda teaches as Associate Professor of Practice at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Michigan and serves on the board of the Academy for Neuroscience for Architecture. She received her Bachelor's degree in Architecture from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, M.A. from National University of Singapore, and PhD in Architecture from Texas A&M University.

Dr. Nanda led the research arm of HKS from 2013- 2023 to bring neuroevidence-based and culturally responsive approaches to building environments that support innovation, creative thinking, and brain health on an international scale. In addition to her book, Sensthetics: A Crossmodal Approach to Designing for the Senses, Dr. Nanda has published her work on designing sensory environments that support brain health and creative thinking extensively in peer-reviewed journals. In particular, her recent work has investigated the contributions of enriched environments to promoting creativity and brain health in an aging population. She has also examined the power of bringing art into healthcare spaces (particularly in the context of patient anxiety and waiting room behaviors) and creating “cocoon” spaces for individuals with sensory processing needs in otherwise-chaotic environments.

Dr. Nanda’s research has been awarded the AIA Upjohn Grant, European Healthcare Design Research Award, and Journal of Interior Design Scholarship Excellence award. Recently, Dr. Nanda was recognized with Architectural Record’s 2018 Women in Architecture Innovator Award and in a 2021 book of “The Women Who Changed Architecture” for her research on designing spaces that promote healthy behaviors.

Kosa Goucher-Lambert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and affiliated faculty with the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley. Dr. Goucher-Lambert is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2019 Excellence in Design Science Award, and several best paper awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Design Society.

At UC Berkeley, he directs the Cognition and Computation in Design (Co-Design) Lab, whose goals include developing theories of design processes, models predicting user responses to designs, and tools to enhance designer capabilities through human-computer synthesis. The lab’s research includes human-subject studies, neuroimaging, computational modeling, interactive prototype development, and in-situ studies of student and professional designers.

Much of Dr. Goucher-Lambert’s research has examined the psychological and neurocognitive factors that influence the generation of design concepts and design performance, such as how different types of inspirational stimuli impact design processes and the creativity of generated ideas. He has examined the brain's response to these stimuli and how the semantic and spatial characteristics of such stimuli influence downstream thought processes and design outcomes. Dr. Goucher-Lambert and his colleagues have also investigated the impact of “adaptive inspiration” on design outcomes, whereby design inspiration stimuli (e.g. analogies, patents) are presented adaptively based on ongoing thought content and output of the designer. Recently these methods have been expanded to more dynamic interaction modalities, including 3D modeling.

His work has also included investigating the neural correlates of active design thinking, including modeling state transitions in the brain during creative thought that may represent cognitive shifts in the concept generation process. Additionally, his lab explores how humans and artificial systems differ in how they approach design, including how they generate design concepts and represent and judge the similarity of design objects, as well as the psychological and functional factors that influence how humans utilize AI systems during design.

SfNC . 12/21/23 SfNC . 12/21/23

Embracing Breaks and Sleep for a Creative Boost

Taking Breaks this Holiday Season Can Benefit Your Brain and Your Ability to be Creative

Insights from the field

As excited as we are about the work we’re doing, we also want to practice what we preach! Significant research in psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated that rest and sleep are not only critical for brain function, but also creativity.

The Critical Role of Sleep in Creativity

Sleep is not only vital to our overall cognitive function, but also for creativity. Getting enough sleep is critical for replenishing our attentional resources and the consolidation and flexible reorganization of memories. In particular, researchers argue that creativity thought is enabled by the interplay between REM and non-REM stages of sleep, which together support the formation and restructuring of complex knowledge frameworks (Lewis, Knoblich, & Poe, 2018). Many studies have shown that people’s ability to solve complex, creative problems is enhanced by sleep (even a nap!) The holiday season offers an ideal time to catch up on sleep, allowing the brain to process and weave together creative ideas.

Letting go, and Letting the Mind Wander Intentionally

A study by the University of Illinois (Lleras, 2011) found that brief diversions from a task can dramatically improve one's ability to focus on that task for prolonged periods. During breaks, our brain continues to process and connect complex ideas. Periods of rest following creative effort, or creative incubation, have long been thought to be a critical component of the creative process, during which defocused attention and/or engaging in unrelated tasks appear facilitate creative idea generation (Sio & Ormerod, 2009). Indeed, letting one’s mind wander can be very cognitively beneficial for creativity, particularly during the incubation period (Baird et al., 2012). In a study of creative writers and scientists, participants reported that many of their best creative ideas occurred to them when their minds were wandering while engaged in another task (Gable et al., 2019).

Importantly, not all mind wandering may be equally beneficial for creativity. Research suggests that when we’re burnt out and our capacity for cognitive control is depleted, our minds are more likely to wander unintentionally, which harms our productivity. On the other hand, intentional mind wandering, especially while doing a moderately engaging task such as walking, cooking, or socializing, appears to be helpful for improving creativity (Irving et al., 2022).

SfNC . 10/8/23 SfNC . 10/8/23

Introducting Creative Currents: SfNC's Monthly Newsletter

At SfNC, we think the science of human creativity is fascinating - and more urgent than ever!

Since its founding in 2015, the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity has advocated for greater attention and scholarship around the science of human creativity. As a professional society of creativity scientists, artists, and practitioners, our aim is to foster research on human creativity and to provide a forum for sharing and applying this research.

Creative Currents, our new monthly newsletter, will be a space for us to share announcements, research updates, and important information about SfNC’s programming, annual meeting, and initiatives. Creative Currents will also act as a listserv through which our members and affiliates can advertise events, conferences, job postings, etc. with our subscribers.

To submit an announcement or job posting you’d like to be featured on a future installment of Creative Currents, fill out our contact form on our website https://www.tsfnc.org/contact or email Christine Chesebrough at christinechesebrough@gmail.com.

SfNC . 10/8/23 SfNC . 10/8/23

Interview with SfNC's President, Evangelia G. Chrysikou

Interview with SfNC President, Evangelia G. Chrysikou about her research and perspective on the field of the neuroscience of creativity!

**SfNC President, Evangelia G. Chrysikou**

Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Drexel University

We sat down with Dr. Evangelia (Lila) Chrysikou, SfNC’s current President to talk about her journey to becoming a creativity researcher, her current research perspective on the field, and what she sees for the future of the neuroscience of creativity! You can also read more about Dr. Chrysikou’s work in a recent article she was featured in in Nautilus. What Separates Highly Creative People

How did you become interested in studying creative cognition?

I’ve always been very curious about how people create new objects to solve various problems. I’ve also been fascinated by individual differences in these processes. My brother, for example, is a set designer and he sees the world very differently from me—who is more comfortable with the verbal/writing realm. I started studying creative cognition during my junior year in college; my honors thesis was actually on creativity in product designers (with my brother’s college cohort as participants). I’ve been very fortunate to get to explore creative processes—the topic that I’m so passionate about— ever since.

What research questions about creativity are you currently investigating, and how does creativity fit with the other work being conducted in your lab?

Creativity research in our lab is situated within our broader themes of memory, learning, and cognitive and affective regulation. Our ongoing studies focus on the relationships between conceptual knowledge and creative thinking using functional neuroimaging and noninvasive brain stimulation. With the support from the National Science Foundation, we are also currently exploring how learning preferences relate to creative problem solving in design and the educational implications of these effects. Across trainees and collaborators, it’s been great to have a very active team invested in these questions!
What do you think the most exciting current research being done on creativity right now?

That’s a great question. There is a lot of exciting research happening in the field. Some of it—for example on new methods in creativity research that will be the focus of our Virtual Midyear Event on November 17, sponsored by CRJ—explores new techniques for assessing or capturing creativity using dynamic analytical approaches. Leveraging large datasets in creativity research is another very promising and a great avenue to address inconsistencies in the historical literature. I’ve also been verry interested in the growing literature on creative thinking in neuropsychological patients. It’s an exciting time to be a creativity researcher!

What have your priorities been as President of SfNC these past few years? What is your vision for the society?

I took on the President’s role in June 2022 (our Presidential terms are now 2-years in length). I am so excited to be working with our fantastic executive and organizing committees on many initiatives. Among our priorities is to expand our outreach as a society to entities and organizations not only within, but also outside of academia. For example, along with members of our Executive Committee, we gave a Masterclass on creativity at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier this year, which was a wonderful way to discuss creativity and its impact in many real-world contexts. We are also thrilled to have CRJ as the official journal of SfNC. As we are moving into this new post-pandemic era, it’s critical for us to reconnect with researchers and the general public during in-person events, like our annual meeting—this year in Toronto, April 11-12, 2024. SfNC is, above-all, a scientific society committed to the most methodologically-rigorous creativity research. In this context, SfNC is leading collaborations with creativity researchers worldwide to provide a repository of standardized creativity tasks, as well as a series of authoritative papers with an emphasis on methodological best-practices for creativity research. I am very excited about these initiatives, which we hope provide a foundation for moving forward the field of creativity research.

What opportunities do you see in the near and distant future for creativity research? What research do you hope to see in the field over the next 5-10 years? Where do you think the field should focus?

A lot of our research still relies on laboratory tasks, which are quite limited in their ability to capture real-world creative performance. Moving away from dichotomized assessments (e.g., divergent-convergent thinking), and exploring the cognitive and neural processes involved in real-world creativity tasks is where I’d like to see the field moving toward—if we are to really understand how creativity works.