The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking

Abstract

Creative thinking is composed of a generation phase, where individuals form candidate ideas, and an evaluation phase, where individuals monitor the quality of their ideas, in terms of both their originality and adequacy, to select the best one. Here, we conceptualize creative evaluation as a specific type of decision-making, where participants attribute subjective values to ideas to guide their choice. Yet, while subjective values and preferences have been the focus of many studies in classical decision-making, their involvement in creative decision-making remains largely unexplored. Combining creative generation tasks and rating tasks, the present study demonstrates that individuals assign subjective values to ideas and that these values depend on a relative balance of the ideas originality and adequacy, which is determined by individual preferences and predicts their creative abilities. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we found that the human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas, and that the Default Mode and the Executive Control Networks, rather than being split into idea generation and evaluation, respectively reflect the originality and adequacy of ideas. Interestingly, the relative functional connectivity of the Default Mode and Executive Control Networks with the human reward system correlates with the relative balance of adequacy and originality in individuals preferences. These results bridge a gap in the current literature by providing new evidence regarding the neural bases for originality and adequacy monitoring and add valuation to the incomplete behavioral and neural accounts of creativity, offering perspectives on the influence of individual preferences on creative abilities.