| Creative insight is one of key factors of creative thinking. The study on creative insight can not only extend and deepen our understandings on creative thinking, but also illustrate and resolve a number of ambiguous and basic problems on kinds of theories in creativity. Previous studies mainly employed different types of tasks to investigate systemically mental and neural mechanisms of insight, especially the two key processes-the breaking of mental set and the forming of novel association.However, a variety of types of tasks are markedly domain-specific, which results in significant differences on mental and neural mechanisms of creative insight across studies adopted different approaches. The study firstly tried to differentiate different types of insight from each other, and mainly focused on the psychological and brain mechanisms of associative insight.The present study conducted a serial of behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging experiments to determine the mental and neural mechanism underlying associative verbal insight. Firstly, it developed Chinese compound remote associate problems (RAT) based on Mednick's (1962) associative theory and employed some tasks such as questionnaire on the trend of creative personality, verbal and visuo-spatial classical insight problem solving tasks to examine the reliability and validity of these problems. The results revealed that here developed task has good reliablity and validity and is appropriate for examining the cognitive processes of associative insight. Meanwhile, our data also showed that the Chinese compound RAT problems can be classified as insight problems and non-insight problems. When subjects were required to solve these problems, they exhibited dynamic emotional/affective effects throughout the whole solving process. They experienced negative emotions such as frustration and confusion when they encountered mental impasses during problem solving. In contrast, they experienced positive emotions such as happiness and delight when they solved problems successfully. Moreover,subjective reports and emotion selection studies both revealed that "Aha!" experience accompanying successful solving consisted of happy, delight and cognitive ease.The present study adopted primers including problems and solutions at the various phases of the problem solving to examine the lateralized brain mechanisms underlying associative insight. Results revealed that there was a dynamic interaction pattern between hemispheres at the various phases of the problem solving,rather than a long-lasting and prominent effect of one hemisphere. The potential mechanism is semantic activation, selection and interaction. The electrophysiological study on associative insight not only supported the behavioral results,but also further demonstrated that insight problems as opposed to non-insight problems elicited significantly different brain potentials in the time course of 600-800ms and 1000-1200ms after onset of the initial attempt, which were mainly associated with cognitive control and the forming of mental impasses during insight problem solving.Moreover, the ERPs study exhibited that insight problem solving compared to non-insight problem solving elicited different significantly but co-variable brain potentials across hemispheres in the time course of 800-1000ms after the onset of the second attempt,which was proposed to be linked with the forming of novel associations. Moreover, neuroimaging results revealed that associative insight mainly activated numerous regions distributed at the right hemisphere, including the right anterior cingulated cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, precuneus, middle temporal gyrus,postcentral gyrus and inferior parietal lobule, as well as the left anterior cingulated cortex. Associative insight, additionally, exhibited some differences in several somatic markers such as (larger) SCR at the stage of "Aha!" experience of Chinese compound RAT problem solving.In conclusion, our results revealed that associative insight,as measured by Chinese RAT problems solving task, is a triarchic interactive processing of mind-brain-body, which mainly based on semantic networks and semantic spreading mechanisms, achieved through the dynamic interaction and coordination across these two hemispheres, and had a core feature of cognitive-affective integration. |
PDF Full Text Request