Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/581710.581730acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesc-n-cConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process

Published: 13 October 2002 Publication History

Abstract

This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many memory locations. Because of the distributed, content-addressable structure of memory, the diverse contents of these many locations merge to generate the next thought. Novel associations often result. As one focuses on an idea, the region searched and retrieved from narrows, such that the next thought is the product of fewer memory locations. This enables a shift from association-based to causation-based thinking, which facilitates the fine-tuning and manifestation of the creative work.

References

[1]
Abeles, M. & Bergman, H. Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. Journal of Neurophysiology 70, 4 (1993), 1629--1638.]]
[2]
Barron, F. Creativity and Psychological Health, Van Nostrand, 1963.]]
[3]
Boden, M. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Revised edition, Cardinal, 1990/1992.]]
[4]
Bowers, K.S. & Keeling, K.R. Heart-rate variability in creative functioning. Psychological Reports 29 (1971), 160--162.]]
[5]
Campbell, D. Evolutionary Epistomology. In Evolutionary Epistomology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, eds. G. Radnitzky &. W.W. Bartley III, Open Court, LaSalle IL, 1987.]]
[6]
Campbell, F.W. & Robson, J.G. Application of Fourier analysis to the visibility of gratings. Journal of Physiology, 197 (1968), 551--566.]]
[7]
Cariani, P. As if time really mattered: temporal strategies for neural coding of sensory information. In Origins: Brain and self-organization, ed. K. Pribram. Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ, 1995, 161--229.]]
[8]
Cariani, P. Temporal coding of sensory information. In Computational neuroscience: Trends in research 1997, ed. J.M. Bower. Plenum, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1997, 591--598.]]
[9]
Dartnell, T. Artificial intelligence and creativity: An introduction. Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Intelligence Quarterly 85 (1993).]]
[10]
Dennett, D. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Harvester Press, 1978.]]
[11]
De Valois, R.L. & De Valois, K.K. Spatial Vision. Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 1988.]]
[12]
Dewing, K. & Battye, G. Attentional deployment and non-verbal fluency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (1971), 214--218.]]
[13]
Dykes, M. & McGhie, A. A comparative study of attentional strategies in schizophrenics and highly creative normal subjects. British Journal of Psychiatry 128 (1976), 50--56.]]
[14]
Emmers, R. Pain: A Spike-Interval Coded Message in the Brain. Raven Press, Philadelphia PA, 1981.]]
[15]
Eysenck, H.J. Genius: The Natural History of Creativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1995.]]
[16]
Feist, G.J. The influence of personality on artistic and scientific creativity. In: Handbook of Creativity, ed. R. J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK (1999), 273--296.]]
[17]
Feldman, J.A. & Ballard, D.H. Connectionist models and their properties. Cognitive Science 6 (1982), 205--254.]]
[18]
Fodor, E.M. Subclinical manifestations of psychosis-proneness, ego-strength, and creativity. Personality and Individual Differences 18 (1995), 635--642.]]
[19]
Gabora, L. The beer can theory of creativity. In Creative Evolutionary Systems, eds. P. Bentley & D. Corne, Morgan Kauffman (2002), 147--161. Available at http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/09/76/]]
[20]
Gabora, L. Toward a theory of creative inklings. In (R. Ascott, Ed.) Art, Technology, and Consciousness, Intellect Press (2000), 159--164. Available at http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/08/56/]]
[21]
Gabora, L. & Aerts, D. Contextualizing concepts. Proceedings of the 15th International FLAIRS Conference (Pensacola Florida, May 2002), American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 148--152.]]
[22]
Gabora, L. & Aerts, D. Contextualizing concepts using a mathematical generalization of the quantum formalism. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelliegence, to appear in special issue on concepts and categories (2002). http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/papers/jetai.pdf]]
[23]
Hadamard, J. The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1949.]]
[24]
Hancock, P.J.B., Smith, L.S. & Phillips, W.A. A biologically supported error-correcting learning rule. Neural Computation 3, 2 (1991), 201--212.]]
[25]
Hebb, D.O. The Organization of Behavior. Wiley, 1949.]]
[26]
Hinton, G., McClelland, J.L. & Rummelhart, D.E. Distributed representations. In Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition, eds. Rummelhart, D. E. & J. L. McClelland. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1986.]]
[27]
Holden, S.B. & Niranjan, M. Average-case learning curves for radial basis function networks. Neural Computation 9, 2 (1997), 441--460.]]
[28]
Hopfield, J.J. Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 79 (1982), 2554--2558.]]
[29]
Hopfield, J.J., Feinstein, D.L. & Palmer, R.G. "Unlearning" has a stabilizing effect in collective memories. Nature 304 (1983), 158--159.]]
[30]
James, W. The Principles of Psychology. Dover, New York, 1890/1950.]]
[31]
Johnson-Laird, P.N. Mental Models. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1983.]]
[32]
Kanerva, P. Sparse Distributed Memory, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1988.]]
[33]
Koestler, A. The Act of Creation. Macmillan, 1964.]]
[34]
Lestienne, R. Determination of the precision of spike timing in the visual cortex of anesthetized cats. Biology and Cybernetics 74 (1996), 55--61.]]
[35]
Lestienne, R. amd Strehler, B.L. Time structure and stimulus dependence of precise replicating patterns present in monkey cortical neuron spike trains. Neuroscience (April 1987).]]
[36]
Lu, Y.W., Sundararajan, N. & Saratchandran, P. A sequential learning scheme for function approximation using minimal radial basis function neural networks. Neural Computation 9, 2 (1997) 461--478.]]
[37]
Marr, D. A theory of the cerebellar cortex. Journal of Physiology, 202 (1969), 437--470.]]
[38]
Martindale, C. Creativity, consciousness, and cortical arousal. Journal of Altered States of Consciousness 3 (1977), 69--87.]]
[39]
Martindale, C. Biological bases of creativity. In Handbook of Creativity, ed. R. J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK (1999), 137--152.]]
[40]
Martindale, C. & Armstrong, J. The relationship of creativity to cortical activation and its operant control. Journal of Genetic Psychology 124 (1974), 311--320.]]
[41]
Martindale, C. & Hasenfus, N. EEG differences as a function of creativity, stage of the creative process, and effort to be original. Biological Psychology 6 (1978), 157--167.]]
[42]
Mednick, S.A. The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review 69 (1962), 220--232.]]
[43]
Mendelsohn, G.A. Associative and attentional processes in creative performance. Journal of Personality 44 (1976), 341--369.]]
[44]
Metzinger, T. Faster than thought: Holism, homogeneity, and temporal coding. In Conscious Experience, ed. T. Metzinger. Schoningh/Academic Imprint, Thorverton U.K., 1995.]]
[45]
Mountcastle, V. Temporal order determinants in a somatosthetic frequency discrimination: Sequential order coding. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 682 (1993), 151--170.]]
[46]
Neisser, U. The multiplicity of thought. British Journal of Psychology 54 (1963), 1--14.]]
[47]
Palm, G. On associative memory. Biological Cybernetics 36 (1980), 19--31.]]
[48]
Perkell, D.H. & Bullock, T.H. Neural coding. Neurosciences Research Program Bulletin 6, 3 (1968), 221--348.]]
[49]
Piaget, J. The Language and Thought of the Child. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1926.]]
[50]
Poincare, H. The Foundations of Science. Science Press, Lancaster PA, 1913.]]
[51]
Pribram, K.H., Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figureal Processing. Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ, 1991.]]
[52]
Richards, R.L., Kinney, D.K., Lunde, I., Benet, M., & Merzel, A. Creativity in manic depressives, cyclothymes, their normal relatives, and control subjects. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 97 (1988), 281--289.]]
[53]
Riecke, F. & Warland, D. Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.]]
[54]
Rips, L.J. Necessity and natural categories. Psychological Bulletin 127, 6 (2001) 827--852.]]
[55]
Russ, S.W. Affect and Creativity. Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ, 1993.]]
[56]
Sloman, S. The empirical case for two systems of Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 9, 1 (1996), 3--22.]]
[57]
Smith, G.J.W. & Van de Meer, G. Creativity through psychosomatics. Creativity Research Journal 7 (1994), 159--170.]]
[58]
Stumpf, C. Drug action on the electrical activity of the hippocampus. International Review of Neurobiology 8 (1965), 77--138.]]
[59]
Von der Malsburg, C. Am I thinking assemblies? In Proceedings of the 1984 Trieste Meeting on Brain Theory, ed. G. Palm & A. Aertsen. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1986.]]
[60]
Wallas, G. The Art of Thought. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1926.]]
[61]
Weisberg, R. Creativity: Genius and Other Myths. Freeman Press, New York, 1986.]]
[62]
Willshaw, D.J. Holography, associative memory, and inductive generalization. In Parallel Models of Associative Memory, eds. G.E. Hinton & J.A. Anderson, Lawrence Earlbaum Associates (1981), 83--104.]]
[63]
Willshaw, D. J. & Dayan, P. Optimal plasticity from matrix memory: What goes up must come down. Journal of Neural Computation 2 (1990), 85--93.]]

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Supermind Ideator: How Scaffolding Human-AI Collaboration Can Increase CreativityProceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference10.1145/3643562.3672611(18-28)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
  • (2024)What Counts as ‘Creative’ Work? Articulating Four Epistemic Positions in Creativity-Oriented HCI ResearchProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642854(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)How Does Culture Evolve?Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology, Volume 1010.1093/oso/9780197689783.003.0001(1-52)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
C&C '02: Proceedings of the 4th conference on Creativity & cognition
October 2002
212 pages
ISBN:1581134657
DOI:10.1145/581710
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 October 2002

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. association
  2. associative network
  3. bisociation
  4. brainstorm
  5. creativity
  6. defocused attention
  7. distributed representation
  8. evaluation
  9. focus
  10. generation
  11. idea
  12. intuition
  13. memory

Qualifiers

  • Article

Conference

C&C02
Sponsor:
C&C02: Creativity and Cognition 2002
October 13 - 16, 2002
Loughborough, UK

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 371 submissions, 29%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)143
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)15
Reflects downloads up to 17 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Supermind Ideator: How Scaffolding Human-AI Collaboration Can Increase CreativityProceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference10.1145/3643562.3672611(18-28)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
  • (2024)What Counts as ‘Creative’ Work? Articulating Four Epistemic Positions in Creativity-Oriented HCI ResearchProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642854(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)How Does Culture Evolve?Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology, Volume 1010.1093/oso/9780197689783.003.0001(1-52)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Classification of students’ creative thinking for non-routine mathematical problemsCogent Education10.1080/2331186X.2024.239473811:1Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Towards a mixed human–machine creativityJournal of Cultural Cognitive Science10.1007/s41809-024-00146-68:2(151-165)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Creativity from Life History TheoryThe Journal of Creative Behavior10.1002/jocb.1510Online publication date: 7-Sep-2024
  • (2023)The Genesis of a Tune in the Mind: An Interview Study About Novel Involuntary Musical Imagery RepetitionMusic & Science10.1177/205920432312023316Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
  • (2023)DesignAID: Using Generative AI and Semantic Diversity for Design InspirationProceedings of The ACM Collective Intelligence Conference10.1145/3582269.3615596(1-11)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Incubation and Verification Processes in Information Seeking: A Case Study in the Context of Autonomous LearningProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3576840.3578289(153-160)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023
  • (2023) The optimal balance of controlled and spontaneous processing in insight problem solving: fMRI evidence from Chinese idiom guessing Psychophysiology10.1111/psyp.1424060:7Online publication date: 18-Jan-2023
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media