ArticleCommunications biology2025
The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking.
Article in Communications biology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- A rostral prefrontal mediolateral gradient predicts creativity in frontotemporal dementia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2026Article
- Semantic Memory Structure and Self-Evaluation of Creativity: Evidence Across Tasks and Dimensions.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia as a model for understanding the cognitive and cerebral determinants of verbal creativity.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Article
- The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Switching, fast and slow: Deciphering the dynamics of memory search, its brain connectivity patterns, and its role in creativity.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Creative thinking involves the evaluation of one's ideas in order to select the best one, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this evaluation remain unclear. Using a combination of creativity and rating tasks, this study demonstrates that individuals attribute subjective values to their ideas, as a relative balance of their originality and adequacy. This relative balance depends on individual preferences and predicts individuals' creative abilities. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we find that the Default Mode and the Executive Control Networks respectively encode the originality and adequacy of ideas, and that the human reward system encodes their subjective value. Interestingly, the relative functional connectivity of the Default Mode and Executive Control Networks with the human reward system correlates with the relative balance of adequacy and originality in individuals' preferences. These results add valuation to the incomplete behavioral and neural accounts of creativity, offering perspectives on the influence of individual preferences on creative abilities.
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