The Creative Cognition Approach

Mental processes are the essence of creative endeavour. This text extends this particular view of creativity to the programmes and theoretical views of some of the most prominent researchers in the areas of problem solving, concept formation, and thinking.

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Mental processes are the essence of creative endeavour. This text extends this particular view of creativity, first proposed and developed by the editors in their earlier book "Creative Cognition", to the programmes and theoretical views of some of the most prominent researchers in the areas of problem solving, concept formation, and thinking. Chapters cover a wide range of approaches and processes that play a role in creative cognition, from those that have their roots in associationism (the notion that creative ideas are produced incrementally), through the Gestalt point of view (particularly insight), to current computational approaches. Each chapter deals with central issues in cognition and creativity, and many consider new ways in which creativity can be studied under controlled conditions. This text begins with an analysis of dreams. It then takes up intuition and insight from a contemporary cognitive perspective, and the importance of using prior knowledge in the incremental view of creative problem solving, which is contrasted with the importance of various forms of fixation and sudden insight.
Studies are presented that provide new methods for distinguishing insight problem solving from analytic problem solving, and a general description of recall, problem solving and creative thinking is provided along with relevant experimental evidence. Numerous laboratory studies of creative idea generation are described that reveal the conceptual structures that give rise to imaginative thinking. Visual representations are considered in the context of memory distortions, and in the use of diagrams in scientific discovery. Models that help clarify the relation between comprehension and creativity are discussed and a novel integration of ideas (primary and secondary process thinking, conditioning, genetic algorithms, chaos theory and the thermodynamics of crystallography) are brought together in a connectionist framework. A multivariate investment approach is used to study creative performance, and criteria for assessing and enhancing creative realism are detailed.