Neuronal mechanisms of creative solutions in complex environments

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Starting from previous work on neuronal correlates underlying creativity, the proposed project aims at delineating neural mechanisms involved in the generation of creative solutions in more complex, real-life creativity tasks. We focus on the domain of sports (and particularly on soccer) as this field could be considered as worthwhile field to study behavior in a complex context (Memmert, 2011, p. 373), and it facilitates the investigation of creative performance in an ecologically valid way. For instance, in order to achieve original and successful solutions in soccer game situations, players need to base their decisions on all relevant information from their environments (positions or anticipated behavior of teammates and opponents, players emerging unexpectedly, etc.), and in order to select the most promising solution they continuously need to find a balance between actual stimulus constellation and task-relevant information stored in memory (e. g. inhibiting inappropriate solution approaches). Creative solutions in sport game situations thus appear to be strikingly similar to well-known concepts of creativity such as divergent and convergent modes of thinking, and they seem to require manifold attentional processes, domain-specific knowledge or memory-related demands - processes that are known as important ingredients of creativity. This project will be conducted in close collaboration with Daniel Memmert from the German Sport University Cologne, a world-wide leading expert in research on cognitive mechanisms (including creativity) underlying behavior in complex environments and in different kind of sports. In a first step, we develop experimental tasks that allow the assessment of creativity-related demands involved in creative solutions in soccer game situations in the neuroscientific laboratory. Then, brain activity will be measured during the performance of soccer game situations in a sample of sport students, along with brain activity patterns in the classic AU task (a measure of creative thought in general), in order to ensure comparability with previous research. In doing so, we aim at extending our knowledge about potential brain mechanisms implicated in creativity.