| dc.description.abstract | The creativity presents the ability to innovation, which is crucial in modern industrial society. Beyond the growing importance of creativity, the essence of creativity in the brain remains unknown, because creativity is a spontaneous and uncontrollable cognitive process. Previous study used the divergent thinking as the surrogate of creativity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and they found associations between divergent thinking and the default mode network (DMN). On the other hand, even though creativity is an uncontrollable cognition, Baird et al suggested short-term mind wandering after divergent thinking could enhance creativity performance. Therefore, we attempted to investigate the neural mechanism underlying the creativity enhancement after mind wandering. Total of thirty participants were recruited to perform the fMRI protocol, containing three alternative uses tasks (divergent thinking) and two 0-back tasks (mind wandering) interlaced in between, and two resting scans imposed before and after the entire task engagements. In our results, we found that brain activation in the second AUT task contrast was significantly higher than that in the first AUT, especially on anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Second, dividing the participants into two groups (high and low) according to Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ), we found that the DLPFC activation of high score group overwhelmed that of the low score group. Third, we discovered that cross-region functional connectivity after divergent thinking and mind wandering was noticeably enhanced. Accordingly, we concluded that ACC, PCC and DLPFC activity is associated with creativity performance with delayed effect, and the spontaneous activities better synchronize across multiple brain regions after the creativity task, indicating the neural mechanism underlying the creativity enhancement. | en_US |