Creative thought relies on the reorganization of existing knowledge to generate novel and useful concepts. However, how these new concepts are formed, especially through the processing of novelty and usefulness (which are usually regarded as the key properties of creativity), is not clear. Taking familiar and useful (FU) objects/designs as the starting point or fundamental baseline, we modified them into novel and useless (NS) objects/designs or novel and useful (NU) ones (i.e., truly creative ones) to investigate how the features of novelty and usefulness are processed (processing of novelty: NU minus FU; processing of usefulness: NU minus NS). Specifically, we predicted that the creative integration of novelty and usefulness entails not only the formation of new associations, which could be critically mediated by the hippocampus and adjacent medial temporal lobe (MTL) areas, but also the formation of new concepts or categories, which is supported by the middle temporal gyrus (MTG). We found that both the MTL and the MTG were involved in the processing of novelty and usefulness. The MTG showed distinctive patterns of information processing, reflected by strengthened functional connectivity with the hippocampus to construct new concepts and strengthened functional connectivity with the executive control system to break the boundaries of old concepts. Additionally, participants' subjective evaluations of concept distance showed that the distance between the familiar concept (FU) and the successfully constructed concept (NU) was larger than that between the FU and the unsuccessfully constructed concept (NS), and this pattern was found to correspond to the pattern of their neural representations in the MTG. These findings demonstrate the critical mechanism by which new associations and concepts are formed during novelty and usefulness processing in creative design; this mechanism may be critically mediated by the hippocampus-MTG connection.

中文翻译：

---

海马体和颞中回在创意设计的新颖性和实用性特征处理过程中形成新联想和概念的功能

创造性思维依赖于对现有知识的重组，以产生新颖而有用的概念。然而，这些新概念是如何形成的，特别是通过新颖性和有用性（通常被视为创造力的关键属性）的处理，尚不清楚。以熟悉和有用（FU）的对象/设计为起点或基本基线，我们将它们修改为新颖和无用（NS）的对象/设计或新颖和有用（NU）的对象/设计（即真正有创意的对象/设计），以研究如何处理新颖性和有用性的特征（新颖性处理：NU减去FU；有用性处理：NU减去NS）。具体来说，我们预测新颖性和实用性的创造性整合不仅需要新关联的形成，这可以由海马体和相邻的内侧颞叶 (MTL) 区域介导，但也可以形成新的概念或类别，这得到中颞回 (MTG) 的支持。我们发现 MTL 和 MTG 都参与了新颖性和有用性的处理。MTG表现出独特的信息处理模式，体现在加强与海马体的功能连接以构建新概念，加强与执行控制系统的功能连接以打破旧概念的界限。此外，参与者对概念距离的主观评价表明，熟悉概念（FU）与成功构建的概念（NU）之间的距离大于FU与未成功构建的概念（NS）之间的距离，并且发现这种模式对应于他们在 MTG 中的神经表征模式。这些发现证明了在创意设计的新颖性和有用性处理过程中形成新联想和新概念的关键机制；这种机制可能是由海马-MTG 连接介导的。