Visual Attention Biases in Creativity and Aberrant salience

Both studies on creativity and psychosis have identified a tendency to connect remotely related concepts. Yet, it is unclear whether they share similar perceptual mechanisms. This study investigated how aberrant salience and creativity are related to visual attention allocation in a meaningfulness judgment task. Participants observed objects which were perceptually, semantically, symbolically related and unrelated to the target object. They also observed words which were phonologically, semantically, figuratively related and unrelated to the target word. Individual differences in aberrant salience and creativity were measured. In a non-clinical sample, individuals with aberrant salience exhibited less bias towards longer fixations on semantically related objects versus symbolically related ones. Creative individuals showed less bias towards longer fixations on perceptually similar objects versus unrelated ones. The application of these findings to the creativity-mental illness debate is discussed.