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Beaty Lab at Penn State

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Laboratory (CNCL) at Penn State University studies the psychology and neuroscience of creative thinking.

Our lab uses a combination of behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational approaches to investigate the mechanisms underlying human creativity. We create open-access tools for evaluating creative thinking and examine creativity across diverse domains, such as music, science, and education.

Lab News

CNCL Grad Student Wins Teaching Award

Congratulations to Dan Zeitlen for winning the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award! The award recognizes Dan’s impact and hard work in teaching and mentoring. Great job Dan!

Dr. Beaty Gives a Keynote at Penn State

Dr. Beaty recently gave a keynote speech titled “Beyond Generation: Language Models as Creativity Evaluators” at the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning at Penn State University!

CNCL Grad Student Wins Dissertation Award

Congratulations to Paul DiStefano for winning the Dissertation Award from the Center for Language Science! This award helps support doctoral dissertation research. Way to go Paul!

CNCL Grad Student Wins the Frank X. Barron Award

Congratulations to Simone Luchini for winning the Frank X. Barron award for this year’s Division 10 awards! This award recognizes superior contribution to the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. Way to go Simone!

New Papers

New Paper in Cerebral Cortex

CNCL grad student Simone Luchini recently published a new paper in Cerebral Cortex titled “Enhancing creativity with covert neurofeedback: causal evidence for default-executive network coupling in creative thinking”. Check out the paper here!

New Articles in PACA

CNCL grad student Simone Luchini recently published 2 new papers in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts titled “Automated scoring of creative problem solving with large language models: A comparison of originality and quality ratings” and “Automated assessment of creativity in multilingual narratives”. Check out both papers here and here!

New Article in Communications Biology

Former postdoc Dr. Qunlin Chen, Dan Zeitlen, and Dr. Beaty recently published a new paper in Communication Biology titled “Dynamic switching between brain networks predicts creative ability”. Check out the paper here!

New Article in Thinking Skills and Creativity

Paul DiStefano, Dr. Patterson, and Dr. Beaty recently coauthored a new paper in Thinking Skills and Creativity titled “Evaluating Overinclusive Thinking: Development and Validation of the Categorical Overinclusive Thinking Task (COverTT)”. Check out the paper here!

New preprint on ArXiv

Dr. Laverghetta, Simone Luchini, and Dr. Beaty recently put up a preprint on ArXiv titled “The creative psychometric item generator: a framework for item generation and validation using large language models”. Check out the paper here!