Abstract
Gender differences in creativity have been widely studied in behavioral investigations, but this topic has rarely been the focus of neuroscientific research. The current paper presents follow-up analyses of a previous fMRI study (Abraham et al., Neuropsychologia 50(8):1906–1917, 2012b), in which behavioral and brain function during creative conceptual expansion as well as general divergent thinking were explored. Here, we focus on gender differences within the same sample. Conceptual expansion was assessed with the alternate uses task relative to the object location task, whereas divergent thinking was assessed in terms of responses across both the alternate uses and object location tasks relative to n-back working memory tasks. While men and women were indistinguishable in terms of behavioral performance across all tasks, the pattern of brain activity while engaged in the tasks in question was indicative of strategy differences between the genders. Brain areas related to semantic cognition, rule learning and decision making were preferentially engaged in men during conceptual expansion, whereas women displayed higher activity in regions related to speech processing and social perception. During divergent thinking, declarative memory related regions were strongly activated in men, while regions involved in theory of mind and self-referential processing were more engaged in women. The implications of gender differences in adopted strategies or cognitive style when faced with generative tasks are discussed.
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Notes
Please refer to Abraham et al. (2012b) for a details regarding the rationale behind the original paradigm where inclusive masked contrasts were carried out in the within-subjects analyses. As the male and female groups in the current sample performed comparably on all behavioral measures during the fMRI session, direct between-group comparisons were carried out for all relevant contrasts.
The sample size in the current analyses is larger than that of Abraham et al. (2012b) as all participants who performed above chance on the control tasks and registered movement less than 3 mm were included in the present sample. The same brain regions that were involved in all the within-group contrasts (n = 19) as reported in Abraham et al. (2012b) were also found engaged in the within-group contrasts using the present sample (n = 28).
The word “pseudo-randomized” here means that strict control was exerted over the randomization rules such that (a) all trial transition types were presented equally often, (b) the presentation of trial types was balanced throughout the experiment, etc. In this way, the randomizations of the trial order was consistent and comparable across all participants.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the research project AB390/1 which was awarded to AA. We thank the Bender Institute for Neuroimaging (BION) for their technical support in the data collection.
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Abraham, A., Thybusch, K., Pieritz, K. et al. Gender differences in creative thinking: behavioral and fMRI findings. Brain Imaging and Behavior 8, 39–51 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-013-9241-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-013-9241-4