Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive neuroscience studies of creativity typically employ divergent thinking tasks that prioritize bottom-up processesto generate novel responses. However, real-world creative problem solving is guided by top-down thinking that puts anemphasis on the goal to be achieved. Here, we introduce the Alternative Objects Task (AOT)a novel task that incorpo-rates both bottom-up and down-down thought during problem solving. Guided by functional neuroimaging findings, weemployed transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over frontopolar cortex to investigate causally the impact of tran-sient changes in activity in this region for problem solving performance on the AOT. Participants were presented with aseries of goals and generated either a common or an uncommon object that could satisfy each, while undergoing eitherexcitatory (anodal) or sham tDCS. Analyses of accuracy, reaction times, and semantic distance highlight the importanceof goal-orientation during creative problem solving and its reliance on prefrontal cortex.