Tanvi Patel

Prompted monologues – where people speak at length in response to a topic prompt – offer a controlled but ecologically valid way to study discourse production. However, there is little systematic understanding of how speaker characteristics, topic properties, and experimental context influence discourse of this kind. The Edinburgh Discourse Corpus (EDC) addresses these limitations, bringing together 7,261 spoken monologues collected across nine studies varying in experimental settings, instructions, and task demands. Participants produced speech for between 50 and 90s at a time, in response to a diverse set of prompts probing knowledge and opinions about a range of topics. The corpus contains responses from 462 participants and comprises over a million words of transcribed speech. We calculated 23 measures that capture lexical, semantic, syntactic and discourse-level properties and used Principal Components Analysis to reduce these to seven interpretable components. These speech components were shaped by characteristics of the speaker, prompt, and experimental context. Older adults exhibited reduced speech coherence, positivity, and emotional intensity, but also drew on a more sophisticated vocabulary. Structured prompts elicited more lexically-constrained content while unstructured, open-ended prompts elicited more emotionally-charged language. Experimental context, including setting, task demands, and instruction types, also affected speech, highlighting the role of contextual and pragmatic factors on discourse. These findings suggest that discourse properties are sensitive to a wide range of speaker, prompt and contextual influences, with implications for the design of future discourse elicitation studies. The full EDC, including all transcripts and speech measures, is available as an open-access resource.

Creative thinking is a complex, higher-order ability that draws on multiple cognitive systems. However, the contribution of specific semantic control processes to creativity remains unclear. The current study had two goals: First, we investigated how individual differences in semantic knowledge and control contribute to divergent and convergent styles of creative thinking, beyond the involvement of domain-general executive functions. Second, we explored whether there were age-related differences in semantic and executive abilities, and if these differences influenced the ability to think creatively. Specifically, we examined the role of the two components of semantic control: controlled retrieval and semantic selection. In our study, 63 younger adults and 64 older adults completed semantic, executive, and creative thinking measures. Younger adults demonstrated better executive functioning, while older adults exhibited superior semantic knowledge, controlled retrieval, and convergent thinking abilities. Crucially, there were no age differences across several divergent thinking metrics: automated originality scoring, human ratings, or uniqueness. Regression analyses indicated that semantic knowledge and updating executive ability influenced convergent thinking abilities across both age groups. In contrast, semantic control abilities were predictive of divergent thinking skills, but only in the younger group. Our results emphasize the key role of the semantic system in creative thought, and, critically, indicate that divergent and convergent thinking may rely on different aspects of semantic cognition. Moreover, the recruitment of these abilities varies across the lifespan, in line with increased knowledge reserves and declines in executive control seen in older adults.

Creative ideas often stem from a deliberate process involving the exploration and exploitation of our existing knowledge. This study explores the cognitive mechanisms behind creative problem-solving, focusing on the phases of idea generation and evaluation in the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Generating novel ideas relies on an effective, goal-directed search through semantic memory, while evaluation requires the careful assessment of potential ideas for their appropriateness. These phases are analogous to semantic control processes, which manage the search, manipulation and selection of knowledge in line with specific goals. The current work investigates how individual differences in these cognitive processes relate to performance in divergent and convergent thinking tasks, by deconstructing the standard RAT to isolate generation and evaluation processes. Further, we examined the role of retrieval strategies, specifically clustering (grouping related concepts) and switching (moving between different areas of semantic space), in creative thought. Our findings indicate that the ability to generate ideas under multiple constraints predicts fluency in divergent thinking tasks, while strong evaluation skills may inhibit originality. Furthermore, the analysis of clustering and switching strategies reveals that effective semantic search involves a balance between deep exploration of specific conceptual areas and broad exploration across different semantic clusters. These findings suggest that multiple strategies can lead to creative success, underscoring the importance of flexible cognitive strategies in navigating the semantic space during creative problem-solving.

Effective communication involves a delicate balance between generating novel, engaging content and maintaining a coherent narrative. The neural mechanisms underlying this balance between coherence and creativity in discourse production remain unexplored. The aim of the current study was to investigate the relationship between coherence and creativity in spontaneous speech, with a specific focus on the interaction among three key neural networks: the Default Mode Network, Multiple Demand Network, and the Semantic Control Network. To this end, we conducted a two-part analysis. At the behavioural level, we analysed speech samples produced in response to topic cues, computing measures of global coherence (indexing the degree of connectedness to the main topic) and Divergent Semantic Integration (DSI; reflecting the diversity of ideas incorporated in the narrative). Coherence and divergence in speech were negatively correlated, suggesting a trade-off between maintaining a coherent narrative structure and incorporating creative elements. At the neural level, higher global coherence was associated with greater activation in the Multiple Demand Network, emphasising its role in organising and sustaining logical flow in discourse production. In contrast, functional connectivity analyses demonstrated that higher DSI was related to greater coupling between the Default Mode and Multiple Demand Networks, suggesting that creative speech relies on a dynamic interplay between associative and executive processes. These results provide new insights into the cognitive and neural processes underpinning spontaneous speech production, highlighting the complex interplay between different brain networks in managing competing demands of being coherent and creative.

Creative thinking is a complex higher-order ability that draws on multiple cognitive systems. However, the contribution of specific semantic control processes to creativity remains unclear. The current study had two goals: First, we investigated how individual differences in semantic knowledge and control contribute to divergent and convergent styles of creative thinking, beyond the involvement of domain-general executive functions. Second, we explored whether there were age-related differences in semantic and executive abilities, and if these differences influenced the ability to think creatively. Specifically, we examined the role of the two components of semantic control: controlled retrieval and semantic selection. In our study, 63 younger adults and 64 older adults completed semantic, executive, and creative thinking measures. Younger adults demonstrated better executive functioning, while older adults exhibited superior semantic knowledge, controlled retrieval, and convergent thinking abilities. Crucially, there were no age differences across several divergent thinking metrics: automated originality scoring, human ratings and uniqueness. Regression analyses indicated that semantic knowledge and updating executive ability influenced convergent thinking abilities across both age groups. In contrast, semantic control abilities were predictive of divergent thinking skills, but only in the younger group. Our results emphasize the key role of the semantic system in creative thought, and, critically, indicate that divergent and convergent thinking may rely on different aspects of semantic cognition. Moreover, the recruitment of these abilities varies across the lifespan, in line with increased knowledge reserves and declines in executive control seen in older adults.