Cortical functional connectivity by partial directed coherence in relation to creative thinking: A case study

Abstract

This paper investigates the underlying brain process in creative thinking. The investigation is about the directional brain connectivity for creative thinking between architectural students and nonarchitectural students. This study involved four students from the Faculty of Built Environment and School of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor. The participants were required to complete two sketches of the creative thinking task. The creative thinking task is guided by the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking. While sketching, the brain signals of the participants were captured using electroencephalography. Then, partial directed coherence was applied to analyze the information pathway. The results show that there were differences in both outputs: thinking product (participants' sketches) and thinking process (brain pathways). These initial findings show that it is feasible to use objective measures (thinking process) to assess creativity to augment the subjective assessment of creativity.