Neuronal mechanisms of creative solutions in complex environments

从之前关于神经元相关的潜在创造力的工作开始，该项目旨在描述在更复杂的、现实生活中的创造力任务中产生创造性解决方案的神经机制。我们专注于体育领域（尤其是足球领域），因为这个领域可以被认为是一个有价值的领域，可以在复杂的背景下研究行为（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，为了在足球游戏情境中获得原创和成功的解决方案，玩家需要根据环境中的所有相关信息（队友和对手的位置或预期行为，意外出现的球员等）做出决策。为了选择最有希望的解决方案，他们不断需要在实际刺激星座和存储在记忆中的任务相关信息（例如抑制不适当的解决方案）之间找到平衡。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（如发散和聚合思维模式）惊人地相似，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——这些过程被认为是创造力的重要组成部分。该项目将与来自德国科隆体育大学的Daniel Memmert密切合作，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中评估足球比赛情境中创造性解决方案的创造力相关需求。然后，将在体育学生的样本中测量足球比赛情境中的大脑活动，以及经典AU任务（一般创造性思维的测量）中的大脑活动模式，以确保与先前研究的可比性。在这样做的过程中，我们的目标是扩展我们对涉及创造力的潜在大脑机制的知识。

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.