| Creation is the basic needs of development of science, technology and the social economy, the creating process plays a significant role in the most of creative activities, especially in creativity of technology, science and literature. There is no consensus among different psychologists on definition of creativity, theories and cognitive mechanism. As yet, studies on creativity are concentrated on such areas as delimitation of definition, cognitive and neurophysiological mechanism et al. Because creating process of thinking is a complicated cognitive process, and it involves a complex cognitive process of thinking, most of researchers study creativity indirectly by means of researching the cognitive activities of creating process, such as concept combination, insight, remote associate, creative imagination et al. to study creating process, and have made certain achievement. Along with the development of cognitive neuroscience, many researches have focused on the brain and neural mechanism of creating process. Remote associate theory, which had a stronger effect to creativity researches, states that creative is an ability of association of scattered, unrelated things. Creating process is the process of reintegration elements according to some requests. The association of words whose level of associative strength among them is higher within a semantic network, was more creative. The more association is built among remote things, the more creative the people are. Studies on creativity are concentrated on such areas as remote associate test (RAT), cognitive and neurophysiological mechanism of remote associate process et al.. Researchers study this creating process of remote association by using task of combining remote semantic words, making up stories or sentences by different words. But what are the characteristics of remote association in comparison with closely association? To explore this question, we studied creating process of combining concepts in different semantic distance materials, remote semantic distance (RSD) materials and closely semantic distance (CSD) materials. We specifically wondereded the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanism characteristics of remote association in comparison with closely association and the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanism of creating process in this experimental paradigm.In experiment 1, we chose 40 university students as subjects, we studied the cognitive mechanism of creating process by combining concepts in different semantic distance tasks by employing experiment materials in remote and closely semantic distance, which was 20 pairs in respective condition. According to the analysis results, the response time of creating process by combining concepts in remote semantic distance condition was longer than that in closely semantic distance condition, besides, the percentage of successfully creating process in RSD materials was higher than CSD materials, which showed that the creating process by combining concepts of RSD materials was more difficult than CSD's. The reason of this phenomenon might be that concepts are associated with differing strengths to one another within a semantic network. The level to which a certain concept activates another concept reflects the remoteness of the two conceptual representations. High creative person has an activity of extensive associate that help to form remote, original, surprising integration of element. There is some different cognitive mechanism between the creating process of combining concepts in remote semantic distance materials and closely semantic distance materials, which may be related to the ability of remote associate.Based on experiment 1's paradigm, we further to explored the neural mechanism of creating process by combining concepts in different semantic distance tasks by using ERP methodology. In experiment 2, we chose 15 university students as subjects, we also studied the neural mechanism of creating process by combining concepts in different semantic distance tasks by employing experiment materials in remote and closely semantic distance, which was 80 pairs in respective condition. The result of the EEG data analysis showed that both two kinds of materials had evoked the early potential such as N1, P2, and there was no difference in amplitudes of CSD task and RSD task in the N1,P2, which claimed that CSD materials and RSD materials may share similar process in early stage of visual process. After that, The RSD materials elicited a more negative ERP deflection than did the CSD materials in the time interval between 300 and 500 ms (N400 window). Because N400 is an index of overcoming semantic violation and semantic integration, and is known to be very sensitive to semantic integration processes. The amplitudes of N400 reveals the degree of difficult in semantic integration process. All of these things demonstrate that CSD materials is more difficult than RSD materials in process of semantic integration, which may show that the ability of association of remote things relate to the ability of semantic integration. Yet there was no difference in amplitudes of CSD materials and RSD materials in the time window of 500-1000 ms,1000-1500 ms and 1500-2000 ms, which claimed that CSD task and RSD task might share some processing mechanisms after the course of combining semantic and concept. We also found that there was difference in electrodes between left and right regions, the right hemisphere region evoked more brain electrical activities than left hemisphere region in the time window of 500-2000 both in successfully creating process in CSD materials and RSD materials, but not was found in unsuccessfully creating process, which possibly illustrates that success in creating process is closely related to right hemisphere dominance.We studied creating process of combining concepts in different semantic distance tasks by using experiment materials in remote semantic distance (RSD) and closely semantic distance (CSD). The result showed that some differences were found in the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanism of remote association and combination process, which is related to overcoming semantic violation and semantic integration. The ability of remote association is relevant to the ability of semantic integration. To some extent, our study provides development and supplementary to the formers' researches, and will provide some valuable evidence of electrophysiology to eventually help to reveal mysteries of the creating process of remote associate. |
