During the fellowship, we conducted two behavioral studies and one fMRI studies.
The first behavioral study has been published (Lopez-Persem et al, 2023) and introduces a new computational model to explain the production of creative ideas. Critically, this model includes a "valuator" component, that assigns subjective values to candidate ideas considered by an agent before producing their final response. We found that agents select their final idea based on the values of ideas. Subjective values can be understood as the quantification of how much we like/enjoy things. It is directly linked to subjective preferences. In this study, participants had to provide creative word associations in response to a cue word. Interestingly, we found that the more participants like their ideas, the faster they want to provide them, and the faster they type them on a keyboard. This study demonstrates for the first time the mechanistic role of preferences in semantic creativity.
The second behavioral study (Battistello et al, in prep) replicated and extended the results to two additional domains of creativity: drawings and alternative uses of objects. It demonstrates that preferences have a role in any domain of creativity.
The third study was conducted inside an MRI scanner (with the same design as the first behavioral study) and we discovered that the Brain Valuation System, an equivalent to the reward system, is proportionally activated with how much participants like their responses when generating them. This study confirms the crucial role of preferences in creativity, through a biological explanation. It demonstrates that the Brain Valuation System assigns values to any kind of items, including self-generated ideas, and that creativity partly relies on how we like our ideas. The manuscript is currently in preparation (Moreno-Rodriguez et al, in prep).
Those three studies have been presented by the first authors (Battistello and Moreno-Rodriguez), supervised by A. Lopez-Persem during international conferences on posters and by A. Lopez-Persem through invited talks in national and international seminars and international conferences.
General public outreach was also achieved during the project, with A. Lopez-Persem regularly participates to national and international interviews for diverse media (BBC, Le Monde, France Culture, Phosphore, etc) and general science events (Brain week).
