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.