{"pk":29190,"title":"Examining Prefrontal Cortex Contributions to Creative Problem Solving WithNoninvasive Electric Brain Stimulation","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cognitive neuroscience studies of creativity typically employ divergent thinking tasks that prioritize bottom-up processesto generate novel responses. However, real-world creative problem solving is guided by top-down thinking that puts anemphasis on the goal to be achieved. Here, we introduce the Alternative Objects Task (AOT)a novel task that incorpo-rates both bottom-up and down-down thought during problem solving. Guided by functional neuroimaging findings, weemployed transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over frontopolar cortex to investigate causally the impact of tran-sient changes in activity in this region for problem solving performance on the AOT. Participants were presented with aseries of goals and generated either a common or an uncommon object that could satisfy each, while undergoing eitherexcitatory (anodal) or sham tDCS. Analyses of accuracy, reaction times, and semantic distance highlight the importanceof goal-orientation during creative problem solving and its reliance on prefrontal cortex.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05c6p92t","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Kent","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hubert","name_suffix":"","institution":"Drexel University","department":""},{"first_name":"Evangelia","middle_name":"G.","last_name":"Chrysikou","name_suffix":"","institution":"Drexel University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29190/galley/19061/download/"}]}