Roger Beaty

@roger-beaty.bsky.social

Associate professor of cognitive psychology at Penn State University. Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab (beatylab.la.psu.edu). President-elect of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC; tsfnc.org; @tsfnc.bsky.social).

We are excited about the potential of this flexible, intuitive and automated measure: testing process-centered creativity theory, phenotyping divergent thinking in vast verbal data generated in naturalistic contexts. Did I mention the neural substrate of perplexity? www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Mapping Content and Dynamics in the Stream of Consciousness Through Latent Brain State Analysis

Human thoughts often arise unprompted, forming a stream of consciousness. Despite their ubiquity, it remains unknown how the brain supports unprompted thoughts as an integrated experience with rich co...

cell.com

💡Can we optimize LLMs to be more creative? Introducing Creative Preference Optimization (CrPO) and MuCE (Multi-task Creativity Evaluation Dataset). Result: More novel, diverse, surprising text—without losing quality! 📝 Appearing at #EMNLP2025

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New paper: AI can generate creative ideas when prompted—but can it actually improve our own creativity? In 2 studies (total N = 36,752), we show AI can enhance human creativity through real-time feedback, helping people better evaluate their own ideas.

OSF

osf.io

Paper alert - the sister series on metaphor generation! Insight (aha!) has been traditionally studied in a problem-solving context. Does insight during idea generation have the same characteristics and impact?https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.13488

Exploring How Generating Metaphor Via Insight Versus Analysis Affects Metaphor Quality and Learning Outcomes

Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in wh...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Five years in the making: our meta-analysis of 10 fMRI datasets across Asia, Europe, and North America (N=2,433). We find creative ability emerges from dynamic switching between default and executive brain networks, with optimal creativity at a "sweet spot."

Dynamic switching between brain networks predicts creative ability - Communications Biology

Robust evidence that creativity is tied to the capacity to dynamically switch between brain networks supporting spontaneous and controlled cognition.

nature.com

How should we score divergent thinking tasks to best assess the ability to generate creative ideas? 🤔 It’s a big question in creativity research, so we systematically compared different scoring approaches to evaluate their psychometric quality. Check out our findings! doi.org/10.1002/jocb...

Investigation of Response Aggregation Methods in Divergent Thinking Assessments

Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity, but its assessment is challenged by the fact that DT tasks yield a variable number of respons...

doi.org

The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC) is now accepting nominations for our 2025 awards. We have three awards open to grad students and early-career creativity researchers: Young Investigator Award Dissertation Award Sarah A. Burgess Award Apply by Feb 1: tsfnc.org/sfnc-awards

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Don't miss from Dr. Keith Sawyer: Is creativity connected to mental illness, psychedelic drugs, or autism? Listen to the interview with DR. ANNA ABRAHAM, a neuroscientist and leading creativity researcher on THE SCIENCE OF CREATIVITY podcast keithsawyer.com/bio/podcast....

Keith Sawyer | Creativity, Collaboration, and Learning

Keith Sawyer is one of the country's leading scientific experts on creativity. His 2013 book Zig Zag identifies the 8 stages of the creative process.

keithsawyer.com

How creative are large language models compared to humans? This paper tested 13 standardized creativity tasks, finding LLMs rank at the 52nd percentile overall - essentially average at ideation tasks but notably weaker at creative writing.

Large Language Models show both individual and collective creativity comparable to humans

Artificial intelligence has, so far, largely automated routine tasks, but what does it mean for the future of work if Large Language Models (LLMs) show creativity comparable to humans? To measure the ...

arxiv.org