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Creative individuals can generate novel ideas or products, but do they also possess an extraordinary sensitivity to artistic stimuli that are inherently highly creative? To address this question, we employed a naturalistic paradigm in which adolescents viewed montage-style film clips during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning (n = 88, ages 8-18), while creativity was assessed using the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis revealed that individuals with higher creativity demonstrated significantly stronger neural synchrony during montage sequences, particularly in the dorsal attention network (r = 0.31). Furthermore, neural synchrony in the high-creativity group was significantly greater than that in both the low-creativity group and the mixed high-low creativity group (p < 0.001). Dynamic ISC analysis further demonstrated that montage segments elicited significantly stronger neural synchrony than non-montage segments, particularly in the frontal eye fields (t = 4.683, p < 0.001), suggesting enhanced attentional alignment during montage sequences. These findings suggest that creative individuals exhibit stronger neural alignment when processing temporally discontinuous cinematic structures. More broadly, the results highlight the value of temporally complex, ecologically valid stimuli for investigating individual differences in brain function and provide potential neural markers of creativity in dynamic audiovisual environments.
Yao et al. (Mon,) studied this question.