Alizee Lopez-Persem
Session: Naturalistic & context-dependent decision-making Date & time: 18.06 - 10h10
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/alizeelopezpersem
The role of subjective valuation in creative thinking: behavioral, neural, and causal evidence
What drives us to search for creative ideas, and why does it feel rewarding to discover one? While prior research has established a positive influence of motivation on creative abilities, the role of reward and subjective valuation in creativity remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will present a series of studies that investigate how individual preferences—how people subjectively value ideas—influence creative thinking. First, I will discuss behavioral experiments combined with computational modeling using the Free Generation of Associates Task (FGAT) paired with rating tasks. Our results show that ideas judged as more preferable are generated more rapidly, suggesting that valuation processes are engaged during idea generation. Through computational modeling, we demonstrate that subjective value depends on both the adequacy and originality of ideas, and that these valuations guide response selection and creative output. Next, I will present findings indicating that valuation processes are consistently engaged across a variety of creative tasks. I will then turn to neuroimaging results revealing the involvement of the Brain Valuation System during creative idea generation, further supporting the role of subjective valuation in this process. Finally, I will present a study in which participants’ preferences were experimentally modulated to provide causal evidence for the influence of subjective valuation on creativity. Together, these findings offer converging behavioral, computational, neural, and causal evidence for the central role of subjective valuation mechanisms in creative thinking.