Reward Prediction in Creative Perception and Production

Creativity is a cornerstone of human innovation. Despite its importance, it has traditionally been difficult to define and study rigorously. One important element of creativity seems to involve defying other’s expectations, by contributing something surprising or novel. Within psychology and neuroscience, robust methods exist for studying how the brain prepares for expected events but then responds to the unexpected. Until now, those methods have not been harnessed to study human creativity. In this set of experiments, participants either create and evaluate fictional stories in response to music or generate melodies with an easy-to-use computer interface and then evaluate them for creativity. Natural language processing and musical information retrieval tools are used to identify the uniqueness or the expectation-defying features of stories and sequences; neuroscience tools are incorporated to understand precisely how violations of expectations arise and contribute to creative outputs. The resultant model should help shape scientific knowledge about how to foster the human potential for innovation. The linkage between innovation and expectation-violation will be explored within three major aims: 1) To relate the ability to produce imagined stories and melodies to measures of individual differences in creativity; 2) To relate the perception of creativity to the fulfillment and violations of expectations as defined by the information content of imagined stories and melodies; and 3) To relate neural markers of creativity and innovation to expectancy violations using electroencephalography. The proposed research activities dovetail with plans to develop a course on Music and the Brain that brings together underrepresented students from Psychology, Neuroscience, and Music. In addition, the researchers and their students will organize outreach and career information events with Trenton Arts (Trenton Youth Orchestra) in New Jersey and Project STEP (String Training Education Program) in Boston. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.