title: Enhancement of visual attention precedes the emergence of novel metaphor interpretations.
abstract: Emergence of creative ideas often involves sudden linking of unrelated ideas. Here we demonstrate that the production of insights about novel metaphor was preceded by prolonged visual inspection of metaphorical sentences. The participants made free spoken responses in a task requiring the generation of semantic interpretations about visually presented sentences, where gaze locations were continuously monitored. We found that creative interpretations were primarily generated from novel metaphorical expressions, rather than from conventional expressions. Moreover, presented words within novel metaphors were visually inspected for longer periods specifically before creative interpretations were produced. Interestingly, prolonged gazes occurred several seconds (∼8 s) prior to the generation of creative interpretations, particularly, in the case of the topic word within the metaphor. These results demonstrate latent cognitive process meditating the emergence of insights, and suggest that the prior visual inspection prompted the semantic representation of the metaphorical sentences, which eventually facilitates creative ideas.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human System Science, Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Asuka
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Terai
authors.affiliation: Department of Human System Science, Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Masanori
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nakagawa
authors.affiliation: Division of Cognitive Psychology in Education, Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University Kyoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kusumi
authors.affiliation: Precision and Intelligence Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Yasuharu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Koike
authors.affiliation: Department of Biosciences and Informatics, Keio University Yokohama, Japan.
authors.forename: Koji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Jimura
keywords: conceptual combination; creativity; free spoken response; metaphor comprehension; semantic attention