The association between visual creativity and cortical thickness in healthy adults

• Published in: Neuroscience letters 2018-09, Vol.683, p.104-110
• Main Authors: Tian, Fang, Chen, Qunlin, Zhu, Wenfeng, Wang, Yongming, Yang, Wenjing, Zhu, Xingxing, Tian, Xue, Zhang, Qinglin, Cao, Guikang, Qiu, Jiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cortical thickness; Insula; Prefrontal cortex; Supplementary motor cortex; Visual creativity
• ISSN: 0304-3940; 1872-7972
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2018.06.036

•Visual creativity is an important part of creativity and is the ability to “break imagined integrations of familiar patterns and create novel and useful patterns”, which is considered multifaceted and complex and plays a critical role in many fields, such as art, painting and sculpture. There have been several neuroimaging studies exploring the neural basis of visual creativity, but little is known about the relationship between cortical structure and visual creativity as measured by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. This study explored the association between cortical thickness and visual creativity in a large sample of 310 healthy adults.•The results indicated that visual creativity was significantly negatively correlated with cortical thickness in the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), right supplementary motor cortex (SMA) and the left insula. The cortical thinness of the PFC (e.g. IFG, MFG), the SMA and the insula corresponded to higher visual creative performance, presumably for their role in executive attention, cognitive control, motor planning and dynamic switching.•Our findings of decreased cortical thickness in highly -visually creative individuals could indicate earlier cortical maturation in terms of neuropil myelination and synaptic pruning and it showed that highly-visually creative individuals require more efficient information processing and integration during the process of visual creative thinking. Therefore, we deduced that the excellent visual creative performance of the participants might be associated with above-age neural and brain development, as reflected by the thinner cortex of these four regions. Creativity is necessary to human survival, human prosperity, civilization and well-being. Visual creativity is an important part of creativity and is the ability to create products of novel and useful visual forms, playing important role in many fields such as art, painting and sculpture. There have been several neuroimaging studies exploring the neural basis of visual creativity. However, to date, little is known about the relationship between cortical structure and visual creativity as measured by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Here, we investigated the association between cortical thickness and visual creativity in a large sample of 310 healthy adults. We used multiple regression to analyze the correlation between cortical thickness and visual creativity, adjusting for gender, age