The tools of cognitive creativity assessment

Abstract

Background. The purpose of the study was to assess the occurrence of disorders in the field of cognitive creativity in patients with minimal manifestations of leukoencephalopathy. Materials and methods. The study was carried out in the Expert Health Center in 2021–2022. We have examined 43 patients aged 45–60 years who had hyperintense foci in the white matter of the brain on magnetic resonance imaging, meeting Fazekas 1 criteria, and preserved cognitive abilities according to the MMSE and MoCA (≥ 25 and ≥ 26 points, respectively). As a control, 20 people of the same age with Fazekas 0 were examined, including 9 people employed in the creative professions. Additionally, all participants were examined using the Divergent Association Task (DAT). Statistical processing of the obtained results was performed by methods of dispersion and correlation analysis using Statistica 14.1 software (TIBCO, USA). Results. The average age of patients in the main group was 53.1 ± 0.3 years, while in the controls, it was 52.6 ± 0.5 years. In patients with signs of minimal microangiopathy of cerebral vessels, the MMSE score was on average 26.4 ± 0.2 points, and MoCA — 27.0 ± 0.3 points, while in the control group, 27.8 ± 0.2 and 28.1 ± 0.3 points, respectively (p < 0.05). In the main group, the DAT was on average 59.0 ± 1.3 %, while in the controls, it was 81.9 ± 1.1 % (Z = 3.8; p = 0.0001). The highest indicators of DAT were found in workers of creative specialties — 85.0 ± 0.9 % (Z = 2.7; p = 0.008). Conclusions. There was demonstrated that 95.0 % of patients with minimal manifestations of leukoencephalopathy caused by microangiopathy had a decrease in creative abilities (DAT 59.0 ± 1.3 vs. 81.9 ± 1.1 %; Z = 3.8; p = 0.0001). The coefficient of internal agreement of the DAT test αk was 0.7 with a reproducibility of 85.7 %, which allows recommending the method for use in clinical practice. The method of assessing associative tasks on divergent thinking has a higher sensitivity (97.7 %) than traditional methods of evaluating cognitive abilities at subclinical stages of chronic cerebral blood flow disorders.