Wiley: The Journal of Creative Behavior: Table of Contents

The Impact of Transcranial Photobiomodulation on the Bilateral Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Enhancing Convergent Thinking and Stroop Test

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:21:54 -0700

ABSTRACT

Transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM) has been employed for cognitive enhancement in healthy individuals. This study aimed to investigate the effects of tPBM applied bilaterally over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) on convergent thinking (CT), divergent thinking (DT), and the Stroop test. Additionally, we explored whether Stroop performance mediates the effect of tPBM on creativity. In this double-blind, between-subjects study, 56 healthy participants were randomly assigned to either the tPBM or sham group. tPBM was administered using near-infrared light (810 nm, 40 Hz; 50% duty cycle) over the right and left DLPFC for 20 min. Creativity was assessed at baseline and during stimulation using the Unusual Uses (UU) and Picture Completion (PC) for DT, and the Remote Associates Test (RAT) for CT, and the Stroop test. ANCOVA, controlling for baseline scores, revealed that the tPBM group scored significantly higher than the sham group on the RAT (F = 6.15, p = 0.016) and Stroop (F = 4.89, p = 0.031). However, no significant differences were observed for DT. The findings suggest that tPBM may be effective in enhancing CT, but its effect does not appear to be mediated by improvements in Stroop performance. These results indicate that tPBM could be a promising tool for cognitive enhancement in the healthy population.

Cultivating Creative Potential: A Constraints‐Based Framework for Movement Exploration Instructions

E. Konstantinidou — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:21:16 -0700

ABSTRACT

How constraints affect individuals' creative potential interests many scientific fields. Education, especially after 2000, actively supports creativity promotion, with creativity occupying a prominent place in Physical Education (PE) curricula of many countries. However, the relationship between research and practice on creativity remains challenging to bridge. While teachers appear willing to promote creativity, they lack knowledge or training on effective implementation. This paper develops a scientifically based approach to promoting creativity in PE, particularly in fundamental movement skills, by transferring the Integrated Constraints in Creativity (IConIC) model to motor contexts and incorporating empirical data from motor creativity and divergent thinking research. The Motor Creativity Instructional Constraints (MOCIN) Framework provides a visual representation of instructional constraints conditions, serving as a reference tool for structuring, applying, or testing constraint-based instructional conditions for creativity promotion through fundamental movement skills. By incorporating empirical evidence from motor and cognitive creativity research, which share common pathways and mechanisms, a comprehensive Principles' Index for creativity promotion through movement exploration is synthesized. The Index provides instructional guidance for PE and movement professionals in motor creativity promotion. This work also highlights new research directions in motor creativity assessment and intervention development, introducing the concept of instructional constraints neutrality for unbiased assessment.

Automated Scoring of Creative Achievement

Noah Meinzer, Janika Saretzki, Simon M. Ceh, Mathias Benedek — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:09:57 -0700

ABSTRACT

The assessment of creative achievement (CA) can be cumbersome as participants are typically asked to respond to long lists of possible accomplishments that may still miss their very specific achievements. A bottom-up alternative is to let participants openly report their most significant CAs, which, however, involves more complex scoring such as via human ratings. In this study, we investigated whether language models (LMs) can provide an efficient and valid scoring of such open-ended responses. Across two data sets, participants described their three most significant CAs. These responses were rated by human judges and by three LMs (Llama 3.1–8B, Llama 3.3–70B, GPT-4o) using zero-shot prompting. Correlations between human and LM ratings were consistently high (r = 0.53–0.80), and criterion validity evidence of LM-based scores was largely on par with rater-based scores. In addition, we examined zero-shot domain classification of CAs into nine creative domains (e.g., music, visual arts). Classification accuracy was 62.3% overall; closer inspection suggested that automated classification has the potential to unveil conceptual overlaps between domains and to identify CAs involving multiple domains. Taken together, automated scoring of CA via LMs represents a promising and efficient alternative to traditional CA measures by approximating human ratings and providing useful domain classifications.

Exploring How Generative AI Reshapes Artistic Creativity

Asdrúbal Borges Formiga Sobrinho — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:03:28 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article presents an exploratory study on creativity, grounded in the premise that technologies enable individuals to externalize cognitive abilities, emotions, intentions, and actions. As both catalysts and outcomes of creative activity, technologies also serve as mediums for learning, artistic production, and communication. The qualitative study investigates how the creative process evolves in response to shifting tools, with a particular focus on the generative AI platform Midjourney. Drawing on interviews and small-scale image production, it explores human–computer collaboration in the arts through the experiences of two artists and Art Therapy students at Université Paris Cité. The findings raise important questions about the central role of human agency at both the initial (preparation) and final (verification) stages of the creative process, while suggesting that AI may exert greater influence during the intermediate phases—Incubation and illumination. They also indicate that the potential of generative AI to foster creativity depends on a constellation of individual and contextual factors, which may either support or hinder its contribution to the creative process.

Issue Information

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:42:08 -0700

The Journal of Creative Behavior, Volume 60, Issue 2, June 2026.