The present study used functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) to examine the role of focused attention in divergent thinking and real-life creativity. Participants completed a Navon task, on which the stimuli consisted of a large letter made up of the smaller version of the same (congruent), or a different (incongruent) letter. Participants were cued to identify a letter at either the local or at the global level. A smaller congruency effect - how much faster people responded on the congruent than on the incongruent trials - was an index of focused attention. Overall, larger behavioral congruency effect was accompanied with increased activation in the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), and with increased activation in the left precuneus. Individual differences in divergent thinking, however, were associated with smaller behavioral congruency effect, as well as with smaller right aSTG increase on the incongruent versus congruent targets, suggesting that people with better performance on the divergent thinking tests have more focused attention. Real-world creativity was not associated with the congruency effect, or with any of the regions implicated in the congruency effect. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

中文翻译：

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对视觉一致性影响敏感的大脑活动与发散思维有关。

本研究使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来检查集中注意力在发散性思维和现实生活中的作用。参与者完成了一项Navon任务，其中的刺激由一个大字母组成，一个大字母由相同（一致）或不同（不一致）字母的较小版本组成。要求参加者在本地或全球范围内识别字母。一致性影响较小（人们对一致性的反应要快于不一致的试验的反应速度）是关注的指标。总的来说，更大的行为一致性效应伴随着前颞上回（aSTG）的激活增加，以及左前突的激活增加。但是，个人在分歧思维上的差异，与较小的行为一致性结果相关，以及与不一致目标和一致性目标相比，较小的正确aSTG增加，表明在发散性思维测验中表现较好的人更加关注。现实世界中的创造力与一致性效应或与一致性效应有关的任何区域都不相关。讨论了未来研究的意义和方向。