Alpha oscillations are known to play a central role in several higher-order cognitive functions, especially selective attention, working memory, semantic memory, and creative thinking. Nonetheless, we still know very little about the role of alpha in the generation of more remote semantic associations, which is key to creative and semantic cognition. Furthermore, it remains unclear how these oscillations are shaped by the intention to \"be creative,\" which is the case in most creativity tasks. We aimed to address these gaps in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared alpha oscillatory activity (using a method which distinguishes genuine oscillatory activity from transient events) during the generation of free associations which were more vs. less distant from a given concept. In Experiment 2, we replicated these findings and also compared alpha oscillatory activity when people were generating free associations versus associations with the instruction to be creative (i.e. goal-directed). We found that alpha was consistently higher during the generation of more distant semantic associations, in both experiments. This effect was widespread, involving areas in both left and right hemispheres. Importantly, the instruction to be creative seems to increase alpha phase synchronisation from left to right temporal brain areas, suggesting that intention to be creative changed the flux of information in the brain, likely reflecting an increase in top-down control of semantic search processes. We conclude that goal-directed generation of remote associations relies on top-down mechanisms compared to when associations are freely generated.

Neuronal studies have shown that selectively attending to a common object in one sensory modality results in facilitated processing of that object\'s representations in the ignored sensory modality. Thus, the audiovisual (AV) integration of common objects can be observed under modality-specific selective attention. However, little is known about whether this AV integration can also occur under increased attentional load conditions. Additionally, whether semantic associations between multisensory features of common objects modulate the influence of increased attentional loads on this cross-modal integration remains unknown. In the present study, participants completed an AV integration task (ignored auditory stimuli) under various attentional load conditions: no load, low load, and high load. The semantic associations between AV stimuli were composed of animal pictures presented concurrently with semantically congruent, semantically incongruent, or semantically unrelated auditory stimuli. Our results demonstrated that attentional loads did not disrupt the integration of semantically congruent AV stimuli but suppressed the potential alertness effects induced by incongruent or unrelated auditory stimuli under the condition of modality-specific selective attention. These findings highlight the critical role of semantic association between AV stimuli in modulating the effect of attentional loads on the AV integration of modality-specific selective attention.

Associative relations among words, concepts and percepts are the core building blocks of high-level cognition. When viewing the world \'at a glance\', the associative relations between objects in a scene, or between an object and its visual background, are extracted rapidly. The extent to which such relational processing requires attentional capacity, however, has been heavily disputed over the years. In the present manuscript, I review studies investigating scene-object and object-object associative processing. I then present a series of studies in which I assessed the necessity of spatial attention to various types of visual-semantic relations within a scene. Importantly, in all studies, the spatial and temporal aspects of visual attention were tightly controlled in an attempt to minimize unintentional attention shifts from \'attended\' to \'unattended\' regions. Pairs of stimuli-either objects, scenes or a scene and an object-were briefly presented on each trial, while participants were asked to detect a pre-defined target category (e.g., an animal, a nonsense shape). Response times (RTs) to the target detection task were registered when visual attention spanned both stimuli in a pair vs. when attention was focused on only one of two stimuli. Among non-prioritized stimuli that were not defined as to-be-detected targets, findings consistently demonstrated rapid associative processing when stimuli were fully attended, i.e., shorter RTs to associated than unassociated pairs. Focusing attention on a single stimulus only, however, largely impaired this relational processing. Notably, prioritized targets continued to affect performance even when positioned at an unattended location, and their associative relations with the attended items were well processed and analyzed. Our findings portray an important dissociation between unattended task-irrelevant and task-relevant items: while the former require spatial attentional resources in order to be linked to stimuli positioned inside the attentional focus, the latter may influence high-level recognition and associative processes via feature-based attentional mechanisms that are largely independent of spatial attention.

Language can influence cognition in domains as varied as temporal processing, spatial categorization, and color perception (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Winawer et al., 2007). Here, we provide converging behavioral and neural evidence that bilingual experience can change semantic associations. In Experiment 1, Spanish- and English-speaking bilinguals rated semantically unrelated picture pairs (e.g., cloud-present) as significantly more related in meaning than English monolinguals. Experiment 2 demonstrated that bilinguals who were highly proficient in Spanish and English rated both semantically related (e.g., student-teacher) and unrelated picture pairs (e.g., wall-fruit) as more related than monolinguals and low-proficiency bilinguals. Experiment 3 added ERP measures to provide a more sensitive test of the bilingual effect on semantic ratings, which was assessed through the use of linguistic stimuli (related and unrelated words instead of pictures) and a different bilingual population (Korean-English bilinguals). Bilingualism was associated with a significantly smaller N400 effect (i.e., N400 for unrelated - related), suggesting that bilinguals processed related and unrelated pairs more similarly than monolinguals; this result was coupled with a non-significant behavioral trend of bilinguals judging unrelated words as more related than monolinguals did. Across the three experiments, results show that bilingual experience can influence perceived semantic associations. We propose that bilinguals\' denser and more interconnected phonological, orthographic and lexical systems may change the links between semantic concepts. Such an account is consistent with connectionist models of language that allow for phonological and lexical influences on conceptual representations, with implications for models of bilingual language processing.

For many, colours convey affective meaning. Popular opinion assumes that perception of colour is crucial to influence emotions. However, scientific studies test colour-emotion relationships by presenting colours as patches or terms. When using patches, researchers put great effort into colour presentation. When using terms, researchers have much less control over the colour participants think of. In this between-subjects study, we tested whether emotion associations with colour differ between terms and patches. Participants associated 20 emotion concepts, loading on valence, arousal, and power dimensions, with 12 colours presented as patches (n = 54) or terms (n = 78). We report high similarity in the pattern of associations of specific emotion concepts with terms and patches (r = .82), for all colours except purple (r = .-23). We also observed differences for black, which is associated with more negative emotions and of higher intensity when presented as a term than a patch. Terms and patches differed little in terms of valence, arousal, and power dimensions. Thus, results from studies on colour-emotion relationships using colour terms or patches should be largely comparable. It is possible that emotions are associated with colour concepts rather than particular perceptions or words of colour.

When observers adopt a category-level attentional set, objects that belong to the same category as this attentional set are more likely to enter awareness. For example, a driver who is monitoring the road for cars may be more likely to notice an oncoming car than a pedestrian who is crossing the road. Semantic associations between categories are also known to influence the deployment of attention, but it is unclear whether these associative relationships can influence the visual awareness of objects. To address this issue, we conducted four experiments using an inattentional blindness task. Participants tracked moving images of animals (e.g., monkeys or rabbits). On the last trial, an unexpected object that could belong to the same category as the tracked objects (i.e., a monkey or rabbit) or a semantically associated category (i.e., a banana or carrot) moved across the display. Participants were more likely to notice this object when it was visually salient or belonged to the same category as the tracked objects. However, they were no more likely to notice objects that shared a semantic association with the tracked objects. Thus, although categorical relationships play an important role in the visual awareness of objects, this effect does not extend to associative relationships among objects.

One of the most prominent symptoms of schizophrenia is thought disorder, which manifests itself in language production difficulties. In patients with thought disorders the associations are loosened and sentence production is impaired. The determining behavioral and neural mechanisms of sentence production are still an important subject of recent research and have not yet been fully understood. The aim of the current study was to examine the influence of associative relations and distractor modalities on sentence production in healthy participants and participants with schizophrenia. Therefore, reaction times and neural activation of 12 healthy subjects and 13 subjects with schizophrenia were compared in an adapted picture word interference paradigm (PWI). No significant group differences were found, neither on the behavioral nor on the neural level. On the behavioral level, for the entire group incremental sentence processing was found, i.e. processing of the second noun only starts after the first noun was processed. At the neural level, activation was discovered in the bilateral caudate nuclei and the cerebellum. Those activations could be related to response enhancement and suppression as well as to the modulation of cognitive processes.

Recent functional imaging findings in humans indicate that creativity relies on spontaneous and controlled processes, possibly supported by the default mode and the fronto-parietal control networks, respectively. Here, we examined the ability to generate and combine remote semantic associations, in relation to creative abilities, in patients with focal frontal lesions. Voxel-based lesion-deficit mapping, disconnection-deficit mapping and network-based lesion-deficit approaches revealed critical prefrontal nodes and connections for distinct mechanisms related to creative cognition. Damage to the right medial prefrontal region, or its potential disrupting effect on the default mode network, affected the ability to generate remote ideas, likely by altering the organization of semantic associations. Damage to the left rostrolateral prefrontal region and its connections, or its potential disrupting effect on the left fronto-parietal control network, spared the ability to generate remote ideas but impaired the ability to appropriately combine remote ideas. Hence, the current findings suggest that damage to specific nodes within the default mode and fronto-parietal control networks led to a critical loss of verbal creative abilities by altering distinct cognitive mechanisms.

For complex mental functions such as creative thinking, inter-individual variability is useful to better understand the underlying cognitive components and brain anatomy. Associative theories propose that creative individuals have flexible semantic associations, which allows remote elements to be formed into new combinations. However, the structural brain variability associated with the ability to combine remote associates has not been explored. To address this question, we performed a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) study and explored the anatomical connectivity of significant regions. We developed a Remote Combination Association Task adapted from Mednick\'s test, in which subjects had to find a solution word related to three cue words presented to them. In our adaptation of the task, we used free association norms to quantify the associative distance between the cue words and solution words, and we varied this distance. The tendency to solve the task with insight and the ability to evaluate the appropriateness of a proposed solution were also analysed. Fifty-four healthy volunteers performed this task and underwent a structural MRI. Structure-function relationships were analysed using regression models between grey matter (GM) volume and task performance. Significant clusters were mapped onto an atlas of white matter (WM) tracts. The ability to solve the task, which depended on the associative distance of the solution word, was associated with structural variation in the left rostrolateral prefrontal and posterior parietal regions; the left rostral prefrontal region was connected to distant regions through long-range pathways. By using a creative combination task in which the semantic distance between words varied, we revealed a brain network centred on the left frontal pole that appears to support the ability to combine information in new ways by bridging the semantic distance between pieces of information.

The present research adopted a computational approach to explore the extent to which the semantic content of texts constrains the activation of knowledge-based inferences. Specifically, we examined whether textual semantic constraints (TSC) can explain (1) the activation of predictive inferences, (2) the activation of bridging inferences and (3) the higher prevalence of the activation of bridging inferences compared to predictive inferences. To examine these hypotheses, we computed the strength of semantic associations between texts and probe items as presented to human readers in previous behavioural studies, using the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) algorithm. We tested whether stronger semantic associations are observed for inferred items compared to control items. Our results show that in 15 out of 17 planned comparisons, the computed strength of semantic associations successfully simulated the activation of inferences. These findings suggest that TSC play a central role in the activation of knowledge-based inferences.