Deciphering creativity: A neuro-computational approach to the investigation of creative abilities.

Creativity is an impressive cognitive ability that makes humans an extraordinary species.

To face the timely challenges of our society, creativity is a critical and necessary skill that plays a game-changer role in innovation. Yet, the cognitive and neural mechanisms of creativity are still poorly understood. Formally, creativity is defined as the ability to produce an object/idea that is both original and efficient.

Then, creativity should involve an evaluative process of efficiency and originality, interacting with a generative process that generates candidate ideas.

Today, a unitary modelling approach is still lacking in the field of creative cognition, and the evaluative process has been poorly explored.Through computational modelling, this proposal aims at investigating the specific role of the evaluative component in the creativity mechanisms. This will allow untangling the different steps of the creative process.

The project will use a novel experimental design to develop this model and investigate its neural validity through neuroimaging (fMRI). We expect the main output of this research program to be a neurocomputational model of creativity.

We foresee two major impacts: to establish empirical foundations for a general theory of how humans produce creative ideas and to provide open tools to assess creativity in individuals.

This proposal is in the position to make a major breakthrough in creativity research by providing a new framework for the investigation of creativity mechanisms.

It combines the expertise of the experienced researcher on computational approaches linked to value-based decision-making with the host lab's strength on Neuroscience of Creativity, located in the Paris Brain Institute (ICM), the largest research institute for neuroscience in France.