Roger Beaty

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...

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...

Preprint alert: an out-of-the-box LLM metric for assessing Divergent Thinking, linking process-centered theory of creativity, spontaneous cognition and entropy. #perplexity
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Excited to share this new article I worked on with Abby Cosgrove, Michele Diaz, @roger-beaty.bsky.social, and @yoedkenett.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

📢Several PhD and Postdoc positions in my group (focusing on AI for Scientific Discovery in Physics) at @unituebingen.bsky.social

If you are excited about using AI to design new ways for observing the universe, please apply here: uni-tuebingen.de/en/128980#c2...

💡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

How does the DMN contribute to creativity?

Our review with Roger Beaty (@roger-beaty.bsky.social) and Emmanuelle Volle explores 4 novel trends in research.

The Creativity Challenge: Try Something New With One of These Hobbies Today, try one new thing.

Final day of the @nytimes.com Well week-long #creativity challenge. Ending the run with the most important trait of creative individuals - openness to experience #writingsky #booksky
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Welcome to the 5-Day Creativity Challenge Today, a fun way to feel less stuck.

We spy some familiar faces to the SfNC community in this week's New York Times Creativity Challenge! Check out these short daily creativity exercises to flex those divergent thinking muscles @jamesckaufman.bsky.social @z-i-pringle.bsky.social @roger-beaty.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

So grateful to @tsfnc.bsky.social for the dissertation award (handed to me by my forever mentor and pal @roger-beaty.bsky.social), for the vibrant community, and for picking me to co-chair next year's meeting in Philly! I can't wait to welcome my favorite society to celebrate all things creativity ❤️

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.

Enhancing creativity through neurofeedback:
Check out our recent paper where we use covert neurofeedback to entrain default-executive coupling during creative thinking!

Xinbing (Jack) Zhang, Jack White, Michael Luehrs, Michal Ramot, & @roger-beaty.bsky.social

t.co/glnpPNmJ6R

Join us on May 21 for AI, Creativity & a Changing World, a special symposium on the latest in Creativity & AI research:
🔹 AI & Human Co-Creativity
🔹 Advances in Automated Creativity Scoring
🔹 Expert panel on future trends led by @roger-beaty.bsky.social

Registration opens next week!
#SfNC2025

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...

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

We're Different, We're the Same: Creative Homogeneity Across LLMs Numerous powerful large language models (LLMs) are now available for use as writing support tools, idea generators, and beyond. Although these LLMs are marketed as helpful creative assistants, several...

More evidence of LLM homogeneity on creativity tasks. Even across different LLM models/families, their outputs are more similar to each other than human responses are, lacking semantic diversity. @yoedkenett.bsky.social

Thanks for the shoutout!

SfNC is pleased to offer up to 10 travel awards ($500) for our conference in Paris. Open to all members, presenting or not. Apply through the member portal. @tsfnc.bsky.social

Congratulations to CNCL grad student @simoneluchini.bsky.social on receiving the Frank Baron Award---for superior contributions to creativity research by a grad student---from Division 10 of the APA. And congrats to the other Div10 award winners this year! 🥳👏

We've seen these networks before in relation to creativity. The key new finding is the switching effect: people who toggled between DMN and ECN being *integrated or segregated* showed higher creativity scores.

‪*effects are small and we only assessed creative thinking with a single task (AUT). But we were encouraged to see some findings replicate across countries, scanners, task vs rest, etc.‬

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.

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."

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...

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...

Good question - I could see domain mattering here, but don’t believe they looked at that, perhaps given sample size and skew of the creative achievement questionnaire (though data is open access).

New study finds enhanced creativity in autistic adults is linked to co-occurring ADHD rather than autism itself (N=352). psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

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

The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity is coming to Europe (Paris) for the first time! Abstracts are due Feb. 1. We welcome neuroscience, behavioral, and computational work.

@tsfnc.bsky.social

www.tsfnc.org/sfnc2025-cre...

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....

SfNC Starter Pack Join the conversation

The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (@tsfnc.bsky.social) has a starter pack of folks doing creativity research. We're trying to build the creativity research community here. Please follow and let us know if you'd like to be added.

New work from the lab! Paul developed and validated a new test of overinclusive thinking and explored its relationship to creativity measures. Congrats Paul (and happy birthday 🥳)!