Fusi Giulia, Crepaldi Maura, Colautti Laura, Palmiero Massimiliano, Antonietti Alessandro, Rozzini Luca, Rusconi Maria Luisa
Department of Clinical and Experimental Sciences, University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy.
Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2021 Apr 16;12:652543. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652543. eCollection 2021.
A large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pathological conditions. However, in the last years, it has been argued that these brain pathologies lead only to an augmented "drive to produce" rather than to the emergence of creativity. Moreover, only a few studies analyzed specific creative skills, such as divergent thinking (DT), by standardized tests. This Mini-Review aimed to examine the extent to which DT abilities are preserved in patients affected by FTD. Results showed that DT abilities (both verbal and figural) are altered in different ways according to the specific anatomical and functional changes associated with the diverse forms of FTD. On the one hand, patients affected by the behavioral form of FTD can produce many ideas because of unimpaired access to memory stores (i.e., episodic and semantic), but are not able to recombine flexibly the information to produce original ideas because of damages in the pre-frontal cortex. On the other hand, patients affected by the semantic variant are impaired also in terms of fluency because of the degradation of their semantic memory store. Potential implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
包括单病例和病例系列研究在内的大量研究表明，不同类型的额颞叶痴呆（FTD）患者具有艺术能力出现的特征。这引发了一种假设，即创造性思维技能的增强是这些病理状况的一种表现。然而，在过去几年里，有人认为这些脑部病变仅导致“创作冲动”增强，而非创造力的出现。此外，只有少数研究通过标准化测试分析了特定的创造性技能，如发散性思维（DT）。本综述旨在研究FTD患者中DT能力的保留程度。结果表明，根据与不同形式FTD相关的特定解剖和功能变化，DT能力（包括言语和图形方面）会以不同方式受到影响。一方面，受行为型FTD影响的患者由于对记忆存储（即情景记忆和语义记忆）的访问未受损，能够产生许多想法，但由于前额叶皮质受损，无法灵活重组信息以产生原创想法。另一方面，受语义变异型影响的患者由于其语义记忆存储的退化，在流畅性方面也受到损害。文中还讨论了潜在的影响、局限性和未来的研究方向。
