Reward Prediction in Creative Perception and Production

创造力是人类创新的基石。尽管它很重要，但传统上很难对其进行严格的定义和研究。创造力的一个重要元素似乎包括通过贡献一些令人惊讶或新颖的东西来挑战他人的期望。在心理学和神经科学中，存在着研究大脑如何为预期事件做好准备，然后对意外事件做出反应的可靠方法。直到现在，这些方法还没有被用来研究人类的创造力。在这组实验中，参与者要么根据音乐创作和评价虚构的故事，要么用一个易于使用的电脑界面创作旋律，然后评估它们的创造力。使用自然语言处理和音乐信息检索工具来识别故事和序列的独特性或违背期望的特征；结合神经科学工具来精确地理解违反预期是如何产生的，并有助于创造性的产出。由此产生的模型应该有助于形成关于如何培养人类创新潜力的科学知识。创新和违背期望之间的联系将在三个主要目标下进行探讨：1)将产生想象故事和旋律的能力与创造力的个体差异的测量联系起来；2)将创造力的感知与想象故事和旋律的信息内容所定义的期望的实现和违反联系起来；3)利用脑电图将创造力和创新的神经标记与期望违反联系起来。拟议的研究活动与开发一门音乐与大脑课程的计划相吻合，该课程将心理学、神经科学和音乐领域的代表性不足的学生聚集在一起。此外，研究人员和他们的学生将与新泽西州的特伦顿艺术（特伦顿青年管弦乐团）和波士顿的Project STEP（弦乐培训教育计划）一起组织外展和职业信息活动。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Creativity is a cornerstone of human innovation. Despite its importance, it has traditionally been difficult to define and study rigorously. One important element of creativity seems to involve defying other’s expectations, by contributing something surprising or novel. Within psychology and neuroscience, robust methods exist for studying how the brain prepares for expected events but then responds to the unexpected. Until now, those methods have not been harnessed to study human creativity. In this set of experiments, participants either create and evaluate fictional stories in response to music or generate melodies with an easy-to-use computer interface and then evaluate them for creativity. Natural language processing and musical information retrieval tools are used to identify the uniqueness or the expectation-defying features of stories and sequences; neuroscience tools are incorporated to understand precisely how violations of expectations arise and contribute to creative outputs. The resultant model should help shape scientific knowledge about how to foster the human potential for innovation. The linkage between innovation and expectation-violation will be explored within three major aims: 1) To relate the ability to produce imagined stories and melodies to measures of individual differences in creativity; 2) To relate the perception of creativity to the fulfillment and violations of expectations as defined by the information content of imagined stories and melodies; and 3) To relate neural markers of creativity and innovation to expectancy violations using electroencephalography. The proposed research activities dovetail with plans to develop a course on Music and the Brain that brings together underrepresented students from Psychology, Neuroscience, and Music. In addition, the researchers and their students will organize outreach and career information events with Trenton Arts (Trenton Youth Orchestra) in New Jersey and Project STEP (String Training Education Program) in Boston.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.