title: Is creative insight task-specific? A coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on insightful problem solving.
abstract: The question of whether creative insight varies across problem types has recently come to the forefront of studies of creative cognition. In the present study, to address the nature of creative insight, the coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) technique was utilized to individually conduct three quantitative meta-analyses of neuroimaging experiments that used the compound remote associate (CRA) task, the prototype heuristic (PH) task and the Chinese character chunk decomposition (CCD) task. These tasks were chosen because they are frequently used to uncover the neurocognitive correlates of insight. Our results demonstrated that creative insight reliably activates largely non-overlapping brain regions across task types, with the exception of some shared regions: the CRA task mainly relied on the right parahippocampal gyrus, the superior frontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus; the PH task primarily depended on the right middle occipital gyrus (MOG), the bilateral superior parietal lobule/precuneus, the left inferior parietal lobule, the left lingual gyrus and the left middle frontal gyrus; and the CCD task activated a broad cerebral network consisting of most dorsolateral and medial prefrontal regions, frontoparietal regions and the right MOG. These results provide the first neural evidence of the task dependence of creative insight. The implications of these findings for resolving conflict surrounding the different theories of creative cognition and for defining insight as a set of heterogeneous processes are discussed.
authors.affiliation: School of Public Administration and Institute of Applied Psychology, Hohai University, China.
authors.forename: Wangbing
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: School of Rehabilitation Science, Nanjing Normal University of Special Education, China; School of Psychology and Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Nanjing Normal University, China. Electronic address: psychyy1989@163.com.
authors.forename: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Nanjing Normal University, China. Electronic address: claman@163.com.
authors.forename: Chang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Nanjing Normal University, China.
authors.forename: Xiaojiang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, Capital Normal University, China; Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Electronic address: luoj@psych.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Nanjing Normal University, China.
authors.forename: Zhe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Gong
mesh_terms: D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003405:Creativity; D059907:Functional Neuroimaging / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Chunk decomposition; Insight; Neuroimage; Prototype-heuristic; Remote association