16:30 - 18:00
Wed—HZ_10—Talks9—97
Wed-Talks9
Room:
Room: HZ_10
Chair/s:
Seung-Goo Kim
Perceptual and semantic maps in individual humans share structural features that predict creative abilities
Wed—HZ_10—Talks9—9704
Presented by: Jonas Elpelt
Jonas Elpelt 2*Johannes P.-H. Seiler 1Aida Ghobadi 1Matthias Kaschube 2Simon Rumpel 1
1 Institute of Physiology, Focus Program Translational Neurosciences, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Hanns-Dieter-Hüsch-Weg 19, 55131 Mainz, Germany, 2 Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and Institute for Computer Science, Goethe University Frankfurt, Ruth-Moufang-Straße 1, 60438 Frankfurt, Germany
Building perceptual and associative links between internal representations is a fundamental neural process that allows individuals to organize knowledge about the world and integrate it to support creative and efficient behavior. Representational similarity between pairs of entities reflects their associative connections across sensory processing levels, from lower-order perceptual to higher-order semantic domains. While specific structural features of semantic representational maps have recently been linked to individual creative abilities, it remains unclear to what extent these features are shared with lower-level representational maps that encode perceptual similarities. Here, we investigate this question by presenting human subjects with psychophysical scaling tasks involving two distinct sets of independent and qualitatively diverse stimuli, probing both the auditory perceptual domain and the higher-order semantic domain. Using these tasks, we construct estimates of the corresponding representational structures. Quantitative analysis with graph-theoretical measures reveals a robust positive correlation between specific structural features in the auditory and semantic modalities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these shared representational features predict multiple standard verbal measures of creativity, suggesting that patterns in both semantic and auditory perception reflect creative capacities. Our findings highlight that the overarching representational geometry of an individual, spanning multiple modalities, may play a central role in creative thought. This insight opens the door to exploring non-verbal perceptual approaches as simplified experimental frameworks for assessing creativity-related abilities in humans. The finding potentially could even be transferred to non-human model organisms, offering a novel pathway for cross-species comparisons of creative cognition.
Keywords: representational maps, cognitive maps, creativity, associations, auditory, semantics, networks