Creative Cognition

Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery. Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery. In separate chapters, the authors take up visualization, concept formation, categorization, memory retrieval, and problem solving. They describe novel experimental methods for studying creative cognitive processes under controlled laboratory conditions, along with techniques that can be used to generate many different types of inventions and concepts. Unlike traditional approaches, Creative Cognition considers creativity as a product of numerous cognitive processes, each of which helps to set the stage for insight and discovery. It identifies many of these processes as well as general principles of creative cognition that can be applied across a variety of different domains, with examples in artificial intelligence, engineering design, product development, architecture, education, and the visual arts. Following a summary of previous approaches to creativity, the authors present a theoretical model of the creative process. They review research involving an innovative imagery recombination technique, developed by Finke, that clearly demonstrates that creative inventions can be induced in the laboratory. They then describe experiments in category learning that support the provocative claim that the factors constraining category formation similarly constrain imagination and illustrate the role of various memory processes and other strategies in creative problem solving.

Annotation Surveys the studies and theoretical views of prominent researchers in the areas of problem solving, concept formation, and thinking. Contributors cover a wide range of approaches that play a role in creative cognition, from associationism, to Gestalt, to computational approaches. Topics include dreams, intuition, the use of prior knowledge in creative thinking, insight versus analytic problem solving, and visual and computational processes in creative cognition. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

At the onset, this book provides explanations/definitions for what it is to be "creative." Research-based viewpoints and personal perspectives on creativity lead to an introduction of an Interactive Methodology (IM) and interactive instructional strategies focused on The Interactive Book Report (IBR). Learning-through-play is emphasized. Special needs students, learning styles, thinking and feeling, a psychologist and scientist’s perspectives, effect and affect of the IM and IBR with leadership building are presented. Differentiated instruction activities, mindfulness, neuroplasticity, five case studies involving classroom use of the book’s creative cognition operatives are given explicit attention.

This unique book explores how the conceptual framework of science and technology studies can be applied to creativity and problem-solving research, drawing from and building on the work of Bruno Latour. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book outlines new research practices to capture the origin of ideas. Latour enjoins researchers to adopt a resolutely ethnographic methodology to trace the process by which a creative product, be it a technological innovation or a work of art, is constructed, or instaured. Creativity is explained in terms of the microprocesses that guide and constrain the development of a new idea. These microprocesses operate on and are triggered by material objects, be they maquettes, models, drafts or data representations. The resulting perspective is systemic, casting creativity as emerging from the interaction among heterogenous elements and actants. The book provides critical reflections on problem-solving research and stresses the importance of William James’s radical empiricism and the primary role of experience. The book redefines the concept of insight as an outcome rather than the cause of a new idea. The book uses the work of Latour to cast a new light on the field of creative cognition and will be an essential read for researchers and students of creativity and cognition. It will also be relevant for anyone interested in understanding the origin of creativity, ideas and thoughts.

The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Cognition is an authoritative reference work that offers a well-balanced overview of current scholarship across the full breadth of the rapidly expanding field of creative cognition. It contains 43 chapters written by world-leading researchers, covering foundational issues and concepts as well as state-of-the-art research developments. The handbook draws extensively on contemporary work exploring the cognitive representations and processes associated with creativity, whether studied in the laboratory or as it arises in real-world practice in domains such as education, art, science, entrepreneurship, design, and technological innovation. Chapters also examine the sociocognitive and cultural aspects of creativity in teams and organisations, while additionally capturing the latest research on the cognitive neuroscience of creativity. Providing a compelling synopsis of emerging trends and debates in the field of creative cognition and positioning these in relation to established findings and theories, this text provides a clear sense of the way in which new research is challenging traditional viewpoints. It is an essential reading for researchers in the field of creative cognition as well as advanced students wishing to learn more about the latest developments in this important and rapidly growing area of enquiry.

This multidisciplinary study focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the work of numerous poets, artists, and philosophers from twentieth-century Spain. Beginning with cognitive science, Gala explores the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking, for poets like José María Hinojosa, Clara Janés, and Jorge Guillén.

How would you assemble a machine that can be creative, what would its cogs be? Starting from how humans do creative problem solving, the author has developed a framework to explore whether a diverse set of creative problem-solving tasks can be solved computationally using a unified set of principles. In this book she describes the implementation of related prototype AI systems, and the computational and empirical experiments conducted. The book will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, and laypeople engaged with ideas in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and creativity.

To what extent do creativity and imagination decline in childhood? What factors might influence a decline? Theories of cognitive development show only uni-directional progress (although theorists may disagree whether such progress occurs steadily in small continuous improvements or comes in stages separated by plateaus during which developmental gains are consolidated). Declines in levels of skill are quite uncommon, yet many have observed just such an unusual pattern with regard to the development of creativity and of the imagination. Is there something about the development of one kind of thinking that undermines imaginative and creative thinking? Is it perhaps the process of schooling itself, with its focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the production of correct (rather than imaginative) answers, which promotes this decline? This book explores these questions from a variety of perspectives. Essays from psychologists and educators from diverse backgrounds discuss the relationships among creativity, reason, and knowledge.