The Leslie and Susan Gonda-Goldschmied Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
Laterality. 2012;17(5):602-14. doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2011.599936. Epub 2011 Nov 14.
Ample research suggests that the right cerebral hemisphere plays a central role in verbal creativity as well as in novel metaphor comprehension. The aim of the present study was to directly examine the relation between verbal creativity and right hemisphere involvement during novel metaphor comprehension. Thus 30 healthy adults were asked to fill in the Hebrew version of the Remote Association Test to assess their level of creativity. In addition, reaction times and error rates were measured while these participants performed a semantic judgement task on two word expressions presented in a divided visual field paradigm. The word pairs comprised four types of semantic relations: novel metaphors, conventional metaphors, literal word pairs, and meaningless word pairs. Correlations were conducted to assess the relation between level of creativity and processing of the four pair types in the two cerebral hemispheres. The main finding was of a significant negative correlation between degree of creativity and reaction times to novel metaphor processing in the right hemisphere, thus supporting the involvement of this cerebral hemisphere in both tasks. Results are discussed in light of linguistic theories and recent neuroscientific evidence regarding relative hemispheric involvement during semantic processing.
大量研究表明，右大脑半球在语言创造力以及新颖隐喻理解中起着核心作用。本研究旨在直接考察语言创造力与新颖隐喻理解过程中右半球参与之间的关系。因此，30 名健康成年人被要求填写希伯来语版的远程联想测验，以评估他们的创造力水平。此外，当这些参与者在分视场范式下对两个单词对进行语义判断任务时，还测量了他们的反应时间和错误率。这些单词对包括四种语义关系：新颖隐喻、传统隐喻、字面单词对和无意义单词对。进行相关性分析以评估创造力水平与两个大脑半球对四种配对类型的处理之间的关系。主要发现是创造力程度与右半球处理新颖隐喻的反应时间之间存在显著负相关，这支持了该大脑半球在这两个任务中的参与。结果根据语言理论和最近关于语义处理过程中相对半球参与的神经科学证据进行了讨论。
