Highly Creative Individuals Process Creative Pictorial Information More Effectively: Evidence from an ERP Study

The present study aimed to explore the neural-related mechanism of the creative evaluation process in individual with different levels of creativity. The time course of evaluation process for creative objects was monitored by event-related potentials (EPRs). Forty-five participants were divided into the high-creativity performance (HCP) group and the low-creativity performance (LCP) group and then completed a creative object evaluation task. The behavioral results revealed that the HCP group showed higher accuracy rates on the creative object evaluation task than the LCP group did. The ERPs analysis demonstrated that in the early stage of creative object processing, ordinary objects elicited a more negative anterior N2 at 190-340 ms than the creative objects did in the LCP group. In the late stage of creative object processing, creative objects elicited a more positive ERPs deflection in the HCP group than in the LCP group at 350-500 ms and at 500-1000 ms. Taken together, these results indicate that different creativity performance individuals may express different attention patterns or top-down processing strategy in the early stage of creative object evaluation processing; and high-creativity performance individuals can better utilize both cognitive and non-cognitive evaluation processing in the late stage, to process the creative object effectively.