Abstract: Artistic creative process is the process that artists solve artistic problems and produce creative ideas and products with highly aesthetic value. Artistic creation is a specialized creation. The Geneplore Model suggests that the general creative process includes two stages, including the Generative process and Exploration process. In the generative process, individuals generate useful components related to creativity and combine them together to form pre-creative structures. In the exploration process, individuals interpret pre-creative structures, and select and verify the generated artistic ideas. The brain network dynamic model illuminates that the neural basis of the creative idea generation and exploration process involves the dynamics of the brain’s default network and executive control network interaction.
In this article, we review recent work on the neural substrates of artistic creativity. Abundant studies have demonstrated that the generation of artistic creative ideas involves the separate function of the prefrontal cortex, while the exploration of artistic creative ideas is related to the cooperation of the executive network and the default network. In the generative process, the separate function of the prefrontal cortex is extensive inactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is responsible for executive control, and the activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which is responsible for generating new artistic creative ideas. Activation of the default network contributes to the generation of artistic creative ideas, and the inactivation of the executive control brain region reduces its inhibitory effect on the generation of artistic creative ideas. In the exploration process, the executive network and the default network are cooperated to generate and maintain the internal creative thinking, evaluate and select the generated artistic creative ideas. However, the activation of caudate nucleus, the deactivation of the default mode network, and the activation of the limbic network during the artistic creative process indicate that, beyond the dual-process highlighted by the Geneplore model, there is an intuitive process accompanied by emotion in the process of artistic creation, which may be a cognitive process in the special field of artistic creation. In the process of artistic creation, lots of artists reported that they have a peak creative and holistic experience and enter a flow state. Compared with the general creative process, artistic creation has an emotional intuitive cognitive process, which is an implicit level of cognition, and the neural mechanism involves that the activation of caudate nucleus, the deactivation of the default mode network, and the activation of the limbic network.
Although we speculate that the creative processes of these different art forms have great commonalities, more research on the creative processes of different art types is still needed to provide evidence of their commonalities and differences. Due to the lack of evidence on cognitive neural mechanism with high time resolution in the process of artistic creation, whether generation-exploration processing and emotional intuitive cognitive processing have the chronological order in artistic creation needs to be supported by the empirical evidence of the time process of artistic creation, and further improve the theoretical model of neural mechanism in the process of artistic creation. In the future, researches should be conducted on the embodied mechanism of the artistic creative process.

Key words: artistic creative process, Geneplore model, neural mechanism

摘要： 艺术创造是艺术家运用自我的艺术体验、艺术构思和艺术表现,解决艺术难题,产生较高审美价值的新颖观念或产品的过程。艺术创造过程中创造性想法的生成涉及到前额叶皮层功能的分离,而艺术创造目标导向下创造性想法的验证则与执行网络和默认网络的相互耦合有关。同时,艺术创造过程中存在具有情感性的直觉加工过程,涉及以尾状核为主的基底神经节广泛激活、默认网络内部联结的减弱以及与情感加工相关的边缘网络和脑岛等区域的普遍激活。未来应针对艺术创造具身机制和双侧大脑功能连接等方面开展研究。

关键词: 艺术创造过程, 生成-探索模型, 神经加工机制