The form of a ‘half-baked’ creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations

Abstract

Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to describing how concepts interact, posits that what appears to be discrete, separate ideas are actually different projections of the same underlying mental representation, which can be described as a superposition state, and which may take different outward forms when reflected upon from different perspectives. As creative thought proceeds, this representation loses potentiality to be viewed from different perspectives and manifest as different outcomes. Honing theory yields different predictions from conventional theories about the mental representation of an idea midway through the creative process. These predictions were pitted against one another in two studies: one closed-ended and one open-ended. In the first study, participants were interrupted midway through solving an analogy problem and wrote down what they were thinking in terms of a solution. In the second, participants were instructed to create a painting that expressed their true essence and describe how they conceived of the painting. For both studies, naïve judges categorized these responses as supportive of either the conventional view or the honing theory view. The results of both studies were significantly more consistent with the predictions of honing theory. Some implications for creative cognition, and cognition in general, are discussed.

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture

“…The idea that nothing is truly new because innovation merely involves combining pre-existing elements was discredited decades ago with the discovery of emergent properties in concept (or word) combinations (Osherson & Smith 1981), which have been shown to be not just present, but ubiquitous (Hampton 1987;Storms et al 1998). Indeed, there is a field dedicated to studying, empirically (e.g., Scotney et al 2020) and mathematically (e.g., Aerts & Gabora 2005a;2005b;Aerts & Sozzo 2014;Bruza et al 2012) the kinds of structure that emerge in combinations.…”

From Uncertainty to Insight: An Autocatalytic Framework

“…We now show how creative insight through analogical transfer can be modeled using RAF networks. The focus is not on the mechanisms underlying analogy itself; thus, the model is consistent with theories that emphasize different aspects of analogy such as structure mapping (Gentner, 1983), constraint satisfaction (Holyoak & Thagard, 1996), and potentiality and honing (Scotney et al, 2020). We keep the internal structure of MRs and their associative links-which can be modeled using existing methods-to a minimum, so as to lay bare the proposed approach to importing network science into creativity research.…”

From Uncertainty to Insight: An Autocatalytic Framework

“…We now show how creative insight through analogical transfer can be modeled using RAF networks. The focus is not on the mechanisms underlying analogy itself; thus, the model is consistent with theories that emphasize different aspects of analogy such as structure mapping (Gentner, 1983), constraint satisfaction (Holyoak & Thagard, 1996), and potentiality and honing (Scotney et al, 2020). We keep the internal structure of MRs and their associative links-which can be modeled using existing methods-to a minimum, so as to lay bare the proposed approach to importing network science into creativity research.…”