Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review

A large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pa...

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Autores principales: Fusi, Giulia, Crepaldi, Maura, Colautti, Laura, Palmiero, Massimiliano, Antonietti, Alessandro, Rozzini, Luca, Rusconi, Maria Luisa
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8085258/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33935913
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652543
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author Fusi, Giulia
Crepaldi, Maura
Colautti, Laura
Palmiero, Massimiliano
Antonietti, Alessandro
Rozzini, Luca
Rusconi, Maria Luisa
author_facet Fusi, Giulia
Crepaldi, Maura
Colautti, Laura
Palmiero, Massimiliano
Antonietti, Alessandro
Rozzini, Luca
Rusconi, Maria Luisa
author_sort Fusi, Giulia
collection PubMed
description A large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pathological conditions. However, in the last years, it has been argued that these brain pathologies lead only to an augmented “drive to produce” rather than to the emergence of creativity. Moreover, only a few studies analyzed specific creative skills, such as divergent thinking (DT), by standardized tests. This Mini-Review aimed to examine the extent to which DT abilities are preserved in patients affected by FTD. Results showed that DT abilities (both verbal and figural) are altered in different ways according to the specific anatomical and functional changes associated with the diverse forms of FTD. On the one hand, patients affected by the behavioral form of FTD can produce many ideas because of unimpaired access to memory stores (i.e., episodic and semantic), but are not able to recombine flexibly the information to produce original ideas because of damages in the pre-frontal cortex. On the other hand, patients affected by the semantic variant are impaired also in terms of fluency because of the degradation of their semantic memory store. Potential implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
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spelling pubmed-80852582021-05-01 Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review Fusi, Giulia Crepaldi, Maura Colautti, Laura Palmiero, Massimiliano Antonietti, Alessandro Rozzini, Luca Rusconi, Maria Luisa Front Psychol Psychology A large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pathological conditions. However, in the last years, it has been argued that these brain pathologies lead only to an augmented “drive to produce” rather than to the emergence of creativity. Moreover, only a few studies analyzed specific creative skills, such as divergent thinking (DT), by standardized tests. This Mini-Review aimed to examine the extent to which DT abilities are preserved in patients affected by FTD. Results showed that DT abilities (both verbal and figural) are altered in different ways according to the specific anatomical and functional changes associated with the diverse forms of FTD. On the one hand, patients affected by the behavioral form of FTD can produce many ideas because of unimpaired access to memory stores (i.e., episodic and semantic), but are not able to recombine flexibly the information to produce original ideas because of damages in the pre-frontal cortex. On the other hand, patients affected by the semantic variant are impaired also in terms of fluency because of the degradation of their semantic memory store. Potential implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-04-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8085258/ /pubmed/33935913 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652543 Text en Copyright © 2021 Fusi, Crepaldi, Colautti, Palmiero, Antonietti, Rozzini and Rusconi. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Fusi, Giulia
Crepaldi, Maura
Colautti, Laura
Palmiero, Massimiliano
Antonietti, Alessandro
Rozzini, Luca
Rusconi, Maria Luisa
Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
title Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
title_full Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
title_fullStr Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
title_full_unstemmed Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
title_short Divergent Thinking Abilities in Frontotemporal Dementia: A Mini-Review
title_sort divergent thinking abilities in frontotemporal dementia: a mini-review
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8085258/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33935913
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652543
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