The Neural Mechanism of Insight in Children and Adults: An ERPs Study of Chinese-Generation Task

Abstract

Insight is not only an important component of creativity, but also a vital way of innovation. The age of 9 - 10 is a critical period of the development of creativity; the researches on neural mechanism of children’s insight are useful to the understanding of human creativity development process. Development differences in the time course of brain activations involved in conflict processing of insight were examined for 19 children aged 9 - 10 and 15 young adults when they performed the Chinese character-generation task by adding one stroke (Qiu et al., 2007; Zhao et al., 2011). Results showed that: 1) Aha answers elicited a more negative ERP deflection (N300 - 400) than did No-aha answers in the time window from 300 - 400 ms after onset of the answer; but there was no significant difference between children and adults, which indicated that the cognitive conflict processing between old and new ways of thinking while identifying the answers was similar between children and adults. 2) Aha answers elicited a late positive component (LPC) than did No-aha answers in the time window from 500 - 1000 ms. More importantly, in the Aha condition, LPC had greater amplitude in children than adults; while in No-aha condition, there was no significant difference between two groups, which suggested that in the cognitive processes of updating and maintaining the correct information in the working memory, children need more attentional resources than adults.