Neuronal mechanisms of creative solutions in complex environments

从之前关于神经元关联潜在创造力的工作开始，拟议的项目旨在描绘在更复杂的、现实生活中的创造力任务中产生创造性解决方案所涉及的神经机制。我们将重点放在体育(尤其是足球)领域，因为这一领域可以被认为是值得在复杂背景下研究行为的领域(Memmert，2011，p.373)，它有助于以生态有效的方式调查创造性表现。例如，为了在足球比赛中获得原创和成功的解决方案，球员需要基于来自他们环境的所有相关信息(队友和对手的位置或预期行为，球员意外出现等)来做出决定，并且为了选择最有希望的解决方案，他们需要不断地在实际刺激星座和存储在内存中的与任务相关的信息之间找到平衡(例如，抑制不适当的解决方法)。因此，体育游戏情境中的创造性解决方案似乎与众所周知的创造力概念惊人地相似，例如发散和融合的思维模式，它们似乎需要多种注意力过程、特定领域的知识或与记忆相关的需求--这些过程被称为创造力的重要组成部分。该项目将与德国科隆体育大学的Daniel Memmert密切合作进行，Daniel Memmert是研究复杂环境和不同类型运动中潜在行为的认知机制(包括创造力)的世界领先专家。在第一步中，我们开发了实验任务，允许在神经科学实验室评估与创造性相关的需求，这些需求涉及到足球比赛情景中的创造性解决方案。然后，为了确保与之前的研究具有可比性，将在足球比赛中对体育学生的样本进行大脑活动测量，以及经典AU任务中的大脑活动模式(通常是创造性思维的衡量标准)。通过这样做，我们的目标是扩大我们对与创造力有关的潜在大脑机制的了解。

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.