The framework builds on a biopsychosocial perspective but pushes it further than the familiar three-pillar model. Rather than treating biology, mind, and society as separate influences whose contributions can simply be added together, Neroni proposes that creativity arises from dynamic, interdependent relationships that shift across individuals, tasks, developmental stages, and historical moments. The unit of explanation, in this view, is not the isolated determinant but the evolving configuration of determinants. This distinction matters because the same ingredient can play radically different roles depending on who is using it, what stage of creative work they are in, and what technological or social environment surrounds them. The perspective draws on earlier systemic models, such as the influential account locating creativity in the relationship among person, domain, and field, and on sociocultural approaches that dissolved the boundary between mind and material world. What is new is the extension of this relational logic across all levels of analysis, from neural networks to algorithms.

The neuroscience section of the argument illustrates the problem vividly. Over the past two decades, creativity research has moved away from hunting for a discrete creative brain area toward network-based models. Attention has focused on interactions between the default mode network, which supports internally directed thought, episodic memory, and spontaneous associative processing, and the executive control network, which contributes to working memory, attentional regulation, and the evaluation of emerging ideas. A third system, the salience network, appears to coordinate shifts between internally and externally oriented processing. Studies of divergent thinking, in which people generate multiple unusual uses for everyday objects, have repeatedly found functional coupling between these networks, supporting the idea that creative thought depends on cooperation between idea generation and cognitive control.

Yet recent critiques caution against replacing one reductionism with another. As the framework notes, studies differ substantially in the tasks they use, how they score creativity, and the neural patterns they report, and individual differences in how people approach creative tasks are often overlooked. Evidence that the default mode and executive networks cooperate during divergent thinking does not establish a general neural system for creativity. A broader concern holds that creativity should not be treated as a single cognitive faculty with a dedicated neural substrate, because creative activities recruit very different combinations of cognitive, emotional, perceptual, motor, and domain-specific processes. Findings from lesion studies reinforce this picture: damage to anatomically distinct brain regions can alter fluency, flexibility, or originality, yet distinct sites may connect to common functional circuits, suggesting distributed systems rather than a creative command center. Genetic research tells a similar story. Associations between creative performance and dopaminergic gene variants exist, but creativity is a complex behavioral phenotype that cannot map directly onto individual genes; genetic influences operate indirectly through temperament, reward sensitivity, and neural plasticity, and their expression depends on developmental and environmental conditions.

Development itself dismantles the notion of a biologically fixed creative capacity. Lifespan research distinguishes creative potential, everyday creative behavior, domain-specific performance, and socially recognized achievement, each following different trajectories. Childhood offers neural plasticity and exploratory behavior that favor experimentation, but children lack accumulated domain knowledge, and whether their explorations yield outcomes judged creative depends on task, educational environment, materials, and evaluative criteria. Later adulthood may bring declines in processing speed alongside continued growth in expertise and semantic knowledge, changing the resource mix rather than simply raising or lowering creativity. Research on sex and gender drives the point home: recent meta-analyses find only minimal average gender differences in creative ability, and differences in variability cannot explain the much larger disparities in eminent creative achievement, which instead reflect educational opportunities, institutional barriers, professional networks, and systems of cultural recognition. The significance of any biological characteristic, the framework argues, depends on the developmental, social, and cultural conditions in which it operates.

Psychological research reveals the same conditionality. Executive functions such as working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility can help maintain goals, suppress dominant responses, and shift perspectives, yet stronger executive control is not always beneficial. Control helps when a task demands evaluation, refinement, or adherence to constraints, while less constrained processing may better facilitate access to unusual associations during idea generation. Cognitive flexibility can restructure an ineffective representation, but constant shifting becomes counterproductive when creative work requires sustained elaboration. Metacognition offers a way to understand this coordination: creative activity requires not only generating ideas but assessing progress, selecting strategies, and deciding whether to continue exploring or change direction. Emotion follows the same pattern. Positive affect has been linked to broad attention and associative flexibility, while some negative states support persistence and analytical processing, but recent experimental work shows that cognitive reappraisal facilitated creativity particularly among individuals lower in openness to experience, demonstrating how an emotion-regulation strategy interacts with personality rather than acting universally.

Social and cultural environments do not merely facilitate or inhibit individual creativity; they help shape the possibilities people encounter, the forms of novelty they recognize, and the outcomes that acquire value. Ideas about originality, usefulness, authorship, and innovation vary across societies and historical periods, and recent reviews caution against treating Western and Eastern cultures as homogeneous categories. Multicultural experience has been associated with greater cognitive flexibility, but exposure alone is insufficient; its effects depend on openness, language competence, domain knowledge, and the quality of intercultural engagement. In education, the long-standing debate over whether schooling stifles creativity through standardization or provides the knowledge needed for creative development remains unresolved, and the framework argues the opposition between structure and freedom is too simple. Structure can limit exploration when rigid, but it also supplies the knowledge, strategies, and feedback needed to develop an idea. Autonomy encourages exploration but may be less useful when learners lack the metacognitive skills to evaluate and refine what they generate.

Organizational research adds further layers. Psychological safety, autonomy, and diversity can support creativity, but none guarantees it; actor-context relationships can be synergistic, compensatory, inhibitory, or characterized by diminishing returns. Conditions that increase individual idea generation do not necessarily improve collective innovation, because teams must coordinate expertise, manage disagreement, and select among alternatives. Digital environments complicate the picture further. Recommendation systems and platform architectures shape what information people encounter and which ideas become visible, sometimes expanding access to diverse material while reinforcing particular patterns of attention and popularity. Generative artificial intelligence makes technology’s role even more direct, participating in ideation, recombination, evaluation, and production rather than merely providing access to information.

The evidence on human-AI collaboration illustrates the framework’s central claim with striking clarity. One influential study found that access to generative AI improved evaluations of individual creative stories, particularly among less creative writers, but simultaneously increased similarity across outputs and reduced collective diversity. Another line of research compared large language models used as ghostwriters, taking the primary role in content generation, versus sounding boards providing feedback on human-generated material. Sounding boards improved outcomes for non-experts, while ghostwriting provided no comparable advantage and was detrimental to expert users, possibly by anchoring subsequent human contributions. A separate experiment found that participants produced less creative poetry when given an AI-generated poem to edit than when writing independently, but this disadvantage disappeared when the system supported iterative co-creation with human and AI alternately contributing, and the co-creative configuration preserved higher creative self-efficacy. A meta-analysis of human-AI collaboration found substantial variation in outcomes depending on the relative strengths of humans and machines and how their contributions were combined. The same technology, in other words, can benefit individual performance while constraining diversity at the collective level.

From this configurational account, the framework derives four mechanisms—constraint, affordance, regulation, and feedback or selection—that describe how relationships across levels develop over time. Constraints can limit exploration but also reduce an unmanageable search space and focus attention. Affordances are relational possibilities for action that emerge between a person and their environment, such as an AI system enabling rapid generation of alternatives whose usefulness depends on the user’s expertise and evaluative skills. Regulation encompasses metacognitive monitoring, cognitive control, motivation, and emotion at the individual level, and feedback, norms, and collaboration at the institutional level. Feedback and selection make creative activity recursive, as products are accepted or rejected and systems amplify some outputs while overlooking others. The framework yields testable propositions: the effect of any creativity-related factor should vary with conditions, factors supporting one phase of creative activity should not necessarily support another, the same intervention can have opposite effects at different levels, and the impact of opportunities or constraints should change across development. Rather than asking which factors universally increase creativity, researchers should now ask for whom, under which conditions, at which stage and level, and over what timescale particular factors support or constrain creative activity—a question that demands ecological, longitudinal, multilevel, and interdisciplinary research designs capable of following creative processes as they unfold in the real world.

Subject of Research: A biopsychosocial and sociotechnical framework explaining creativity as a configurational phenomenon across biological, psychological, cultural, and technological levels

Article Title: Creativity beyond the isolated mind: toward a biopsychosocial and sociotechnical perspective

Article References: Neroni, M. A. (2026). Creativity beyond the isolated mind: toward a biopsychosocial and sociotechnical perspective. Frontiers in Cognition, 5, Article 1893765. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2026.1893765

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2026.1893765

Keywords: creativity, neuroscience, biopsychosocial, generative AI, cognitive flexibility, default mode network, executive control, sociocultural, developmental psychology, organizational creativity, human-AI collaboration, metacognition

The research team focused on a traditional form of meditation known as Anapanasati, or mindfulness of breathing, delivered through a standardized mental exercise program called JW2016. Participants practiced for only fifteen minutes per day over eighteen days, a duration deliberately chosen to test whether benefits could emerge without the weeks or months of intensive retreat-style training examined in most previous studies. To capture what was happening inside the brain, the investigators recorded event-related potentials, or ERPs, which are tiny voltage fluctuations measured at the scalp with electroencephalography and time-locked to specific moments of information processing. Because ERPs unfold over milliseconds, they offer a uniquely fine-grained window into how the mind parses, evaluates, and responds to the world.

The behavioral results were striking in their selectivity. Using tasks designed to probe the three canonical attention networks first described by Michael Posner and colleagues, namely alerting, orienting, and executive control, the researchers found that brief mindfulness meditation produced a significant enhancement of the executive control network alone. Overall reaction times dropped from a mean of roughly 631 milliseconds before training to about 599 milliseconds afterward, and the cost incurred when participants had to resolve conflicting information, a classic signature of executive control, shrank robustly. Crucially, this speedup did not come at the expense of accuracy, ruling out the possibility that participants were simply trading carefulness for haste. The alerting and orienting networks, by contrast, remained essentially unchanged, suggesting that the meditation specifically tuned the brain’s capacity for conflict resolution and self-regulation rather than broadly boosting arousal or spatial attention.

Beneath these behavioral gains, the EEG data revealed a fascinating reorganization of temporal processing dynamics. The researchers examined the interval between two well-characterized ERP components: the N1, an early negative deflection reflecting rapid perceptual encoding in sensory cortex, and the P3, a later positive deflection associated with higher-order evaluation, attention allocation, and decision-making. After the eighteen-day intervention, this P3N1 latency interval expanded by 25.52 milliseconds on average, a statistically significant change. In practical terms, the brain appeared to accelerate its early perceptual work while simultaneously prolonging the deliberate, evaluative stage that follows. Rather than processing everything faster in a uniform way, meditators seemed to adopt a strategic division of labor: snap up sensory information quickly, then give it a more extended, considered appraisal before committing to a response.

This temporal expansion was accompanied by evidence of greater neural efficiency, one of the most sought-after outcomes in cognitive neuroscience. Channel-level analyses of covariance showed that the P3N1 latency index was modulated at frontal electrode sites, with significant effects at F3, Fp2, and Fz, regions overlying prefrontal cortex that are heavily implicated in cognitive control and top-down regulation. Meanwhile, the peak-to-peak P3N1 amplitude index, a measure of how much neural resource is recruited between early and late processing stages, was modulated at posterior sites P4 and Oz, over parietal and occipital cortex. Reduced or better-regulated amplitudes in these contexts are typically interpreted as a sign that the brain achieves the same or better performance with less expenditure of neural resources, a hallmark of expert performance seen in studies of athletes, musicians, and long-term meditators alike.

The implications of this pattern are considerable. Executive control is the cognitive machinery that allows us to ignore distractions, override impulses, and stay on task, and it is precisely the faculty most strained by modern environments saturated with notifications, multitasking, and information overload. Deficits in executive control are also central to conditions ranging from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to age-related cognitive decline. If a practice as simple as fifteen minutes of daily breath-focused meditation can measurably strengthen this network in under three weeks, the potential for scalable interventions in schools, workplaces, and clinical settings becomes tangible. The authors explicitly point to such applications, arguing that these neuroplastic adaptations hold significant potential for scalable cognitive training and educational use.

The study also carries methodological weight for the field of meditation research, which has long struggled with questions of dose and mechanism. Many influential studies have examined adept practitioners with thousands of hours of practice, leaving open the possibility that observed brain differences reflect pre-existing traits rather than training effects. By measuring participants before and after a brief, standardized intervention and by anchoring the analysis to millisecond-resolution ERP markers, the present work strengthens the causal case that meditation practice itself drives the observed changes. The specificity of the effects, confined to executive control behaviorally and to particular electrode sites and latency windows electrophysiologically, further argues against a generic placebo or arousal explanation and points toward a genuine reorganization of information processing.

Why might mindfulness of breathing be so effective at tuning executive control in particular? The practice requires continuous monitoring of the breath, rapid detection of mind-wandering, and disengagement from distraction followed by return to the target, a cycle that exercises precisely the conflict-monitoring and inhibitory circuits probed by executive attention tasks. The frontal ERP effects observed at F3, Fp2, and Fz fit neatly with this account, since anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal regions, which generate much of the frontal scalp signal in this latency range, are core nodes of the brain’s salience and control networks. The posterior amplitude effects at P4 and Oz, meanwhile, suggest that visual and attentional resource allocation became more economical, consistent with the idea that trained meditators learn to allocate attention with less wasted effort.

As with any study, caveats remain. The ERP findings come from healthy adults completing a short program, and the durability of the effects, whether they persist weeks or months after training stops, will need to be established in follow-up work. The precise neural generators of the observed scalp effects also require confirmation with source localization or imaging methods. Yet the core message is hard to ignore: the brain’s attention systems are more malleable than previously assumed, and meaningful change does not demand monastic dedication. A brief daily practice, sustained for less than three weeks, appears sufficient to shift the mind toward faster perception, more deliberate evaluation, and more efficient use of neural resources. For a society searching for low-cost, evidence-based ways to bolster attention and self-control, that may be the most compelling headline of all.

Subject of Research: Effects of brief mindfulness meditation on attention networks and neural efficiency measured with event-related potentials

Article Title: Enhancing attention network and neural efficiency through brief mindfulness meditation

Article References: Huang, Y., Guo, J.-H., Zheng, S., Yin, R., Wang, J., & Jiang, C.-L. (2026). Enhancing attention network and neural efficiency through brief mindfulness meditation. npj Science of Learning. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-026-00455-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41539-026-00455-1

Keywords: mindfulness meditation, attention networks, executive control, event-related potentials, neural efficiency, EEG, neuroplasticity, Anapanasati, cognitive training, P3, N1, prefrontal cortex

The research focused on a task that cognitive neuroscientists have refined over decades: the interleaved pro-saccade and anti-saccade paradigm. In a pro-saccade trial, a participant simply looks toward a sudden visual target, an almost reflexive action governed by ancient circuitry linking the retina to the superior colliculus in the brainstem. In an anti-saccade trial, the instruction reverses: the participant must suppress the reflexive pull toward the target and instead look in the exact opposite direction. That act of suppression is anything but trivial. It depends on top-down executive control implemented by frontal-subcortical circuits—the same prefrontal networks that degrade in depression and that underpin planning, inhibition, and working memory. Because the reflexive and voluntary components of eye movement can be measured with millisecond precision, the task offers a window into executive function that is fast, non-invasive, and largely immune to the practice effects and cultural biases that plague paper-and-pencil tests.

The study enrolled 29 older adults diagnosed with late-life depression and 19 cognitively healthy controls of comparable age. Depression severity was quantified with the Geriatric Depression Scale-15, a widely used screening instrument, while global cognitive status was assessed with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, a sensitive measure of mild cognitive impairment. Each participant then completed the interleaved saccade task while a high-speed video-based eye tracker recorded the trajectory, timing, and direction of every eye movement. The researchers extracted a rich set of measures: the rate of direction errors in anti-saccade trials, saccadic reaction times, the frequency of short-latency responses, the kinematic metrics of the movements themselves such as velocity and amplitude, and a less familiar quantity called voluntary override time, or VOT, which captures how long the executive system takes to override the reflexive response.

The headline finding was unambiguous. Older adults with late-life depression made significantly more direction errors on anti-saccade trials than the healthy controls did. In other words, when the task demanded that they suppress the automatic urge to glance at a flashing target, their eyes betrayed them more often. This is precisely the signature one would expect from weakened prefrontal inhibitory control, because the anti-saccade error rate is one of the most reliable behavioral indices of frontal-lobe integrity in the cognitive neuroscience literature. Importantly, the deficit was selective. The basic machinery of eye movement appeared intact: saccade metrics such as peak velocity and amplitude did not differ reliably between the groups, suggesting that the depression-related impairment lay not in the motor periphery or the brainstem reflex circuit itself but in the higher-order control system that decides whether the reflex should be allowed to run.

A second, subtler result added an intriguing twist. Short-latency pro-saccades—reflexive glances toward the target—were actually faster in the depressed group than in the controls. Rather than a general slowing, which clinicians often associate with depression in the form of psychomotor retardation, the eye-movement data revealed a pattern of disinhibition: the reflexive pathway fired more quickly and the voluntary brake applied less effectively. This combination of faster reflexes and weaker suppression points toward an imbalance in the competitive interaction between the superior colliculus, which generates saccade commands, and the frontal cortical networks that modulate them. In computational terms, the threshold for triggering a reflexive response appears lower while the top-down signal that raises that threshold appears weaker, a double hit that compounds executive failure.

Perhaps the most clinically significant finding emerged from correlations within the depressed group. MoCA scores, which index global cognitive performance, were significantly associated with both anti-saccade error rates and voluntary override time, meaning that patients whose eye movements showed the weakest executive control also scored lowest on the standard cognitive assessment. Yet depression severity, as measured by the GDS-15, showed no correlation with any of the oculomotor measures. This dissociation is important. It suggests that the saccade abnormalities track the cognitive dimension of late-life depression rather than the mood symptoms themselves, positioning the eye-tracking paradigm as a potential probe of the executive dysfunction that predicts poorer treatment outcomes, greater functional decline, and elevated risk of progression to dementia in this population.

The implications reach beyond the clinic. Late-life depression affects millions of older adults worldwide and is increasingly understood not merely as a mood disorder but as a condition with genuine neurobiological consequences, involving vascular injury, inflammation, and neurodegeneration in frontal-subcortical circuits. Executive dysfunction is one of its most disabling features, undermining medication adherence, financial decision-making, and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy. Yet because mood symptoms fluctuate and self-report is unreliable, the cognitive component often goes unrecognized until it has already compounded disability. A two-minute eye-tracking test that could be administered in a general practitioner’s office would offer a way to detect this component early, monitor it over time, and potentially identify which patients need closer neuropsychological follow-up.

The authors are careful to frame their results as preliminary. The sample sizes were modest, with 29 patients and 19 controls, and the study design was cross-sectional, capturing a single snapshot rather than tracking change over time. Larger longitudinal cohorts will be needed to establish whether saccade measures are reliable across repeated testing sessions, whether they predict clinical trajectories such as conversion to dementia, and whether they respond to treatment as depression remits. Questions also remain about how the measures perform in patients taking different classes of antidepressant medication, in those with coexisting medical illness, and in populations with different educational backgrounds. The researchers themselves state that further work is required to establish the reliability and clinical utility of saccade-based assessment in late-life depression.

Even so, the study adds to a growing movement in neuroscience and psychiatry toward behavioral measures that bypass self-report entirely. Eye movements occupy a privileged position in this effort because the circuits that control them are well mapped, their timing can be resolved to the millisecond, and the tasks that engage them are simple enough for frail or cognitively impaired patients to complete. The anti-saccade task in particular has a long pedigree as a probe of frontal function, having revealed inhibitory deficits in schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and normal aging. Extending it to late-life depression connects that literature to one of geriatric psychiatry’s most pressing clinical problems and demonstrates that a disorder of mood leaves measurable fingerprints on one of the body’s fastest and most automatic behaviors.

What makes the finding resonate is its elegance: the same neural machinery that lets a person resist an impulsive glance at a flashing light also lets them resist impulsive decisions, hold plans in mind, and steer attention where it needs to go. When that machinery falters in late-life depression, the failure shows up first where it can be measured most precisely—in the eyes. If larger studies confirm the reliability of these saccade-based markers, the humble eye movement could become a routine vital sign of executive health in aging, transforming how clinicians detect, track, and ultimately treat the cognitive shadow that follows depression into later life.

Subject of Research: Executive dysfunction in late-life depression assessed through saccadic eye-movement control

Article Title: Altered saccade control reveals executive dysfunction in late-life depression

Article References: Lee, Y.-T., Tai, Y.-H., Huang, L.-K., Chen, K.-Y., Chen, T.-L., Chen, C., & Wang, C.-A. (2026). Altered saccade control reveals executive dysfunction in late-life depression. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08427-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08427-1

Keywords: late-life depression, saccades, anti-saccade task, executive control, eye tracking, superior colliculus, geriatric psychiatry, MoCA, cognitive control, prefrontal cortex, voluntary override time, BMC Geriatrics