Ronald A. Finke’s research while affiliated with Mass College of Liberal Arts and other places

In this chapter we highlight the generativity of ordinary human cognition, elaborate on the creative cognition approach, and give representative examples of research that further the goals of creative cognition. We conclude with some observations about how creative cognition can help to resolve some long-lasting controversies concerning creativity. Topics include: the normative nature of human creativity; a heuristic model (processes, structures, and constraints; family resemblance in creative cognition, insight, extending concepts, recently activated knowledge, conceptual combination, creative imagery); and resolving controversies regarding the nature of creativity (goal-oriented vs exploratory creativity, domain-specific vs universal creativity skills, structured vs unstructured creativity). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Recent advances in the field of creative cognition have helped to reveal the cognitive structures and processes that are involved in creative thinking and imagination. This article begins by reviewing recent studies of creative imagery that have explored the emergent properties of mental images. The geneplore model of creative cognition, which describes how preinventive structures such as creative mental images are generated and interpreted, is then discussed. In discussing this model and its implications, a distinction is made between aspects of creative imagery that reflect conscious, deliberate control and those that reflect the absence of such control, as illustrated particularly by the emergence of unanticipated structures in imagined forms. The intentional, structured qualities of creative thinking are then contrasted with its spontaneous, unstructured qualities. The article concludes by discussing the recent topics of chaotic cognition and creative realism and how they bear on the general issue of balancing structured and unstructured processes in creative endeavors.

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. Bradford Books imprint

Jim Crocker was an engineer with a problem that was truly far out—in space. The Hubble telescope, the shining hope of astronomers, just wasn’t shining properly, having been outfitted and set into orbit with a flawed primary mirror. At a meeting arranged by NASA, Crocker and his team of engineers floated plan after plan for adjusting the optics on the Hubble, but each idea was ultimately shot down as too complicated or too dangerous for spacewalking astronauts. At an impasse, the team adjourned for a few months before scheduling another meeting in Munich, Germany. At his hotel before the meeting, Crocker, a tall man, reached up to raise the showerhead, which moved with a simple adjustment mechanism. Suddenly, the solution to his engineering problem flashed in his mind. Small optical adjusters could be fitted to correct each beam of information reflected by the Hubble’s flawed mirror, with each adjuster manipulated into its proper place by a simple mechanism conceptually related to the showerhead adjustment. And, it worked! Less than a year after Crocker’s insight solved the celestial problem, the Hubble telescope had already observed a comet smashing into Jupiter, an immense black hole the size of our solar system, and an ancient galaxy formed near the time of the big bang.

We have seen that people often rely heavily on old ideas when they formulate new ones. In this chapter we will examine how existing knowledge influences the artifacts that humans produce. We will see that innovation is basically a conservative process, but also one that allows a flowering of useful new ideas.

Stephen Donaldson, the noted science fiction and fantasy author, had a vexing problem, the sort of problem that most writers dread. He had an idea that he wanted to write about, but could not find a suitable way to convey it. He wanted to probe the abstract concept of “unbelief,” an unwillingness to accept the possibility that fantasy worlds might exist. But, try as he might, he could not discern the story line, the vehicle that could transport this vague idea from mind to paper.

New ideas, whether wondrously creative or merely unusual, are almost always constructed from the building blocks of prior knowledge. Truly creative ideas arise when we wisely preserve and extend what is worthwhile from existing knowledge, and reject only the ideas that constrain our thinking. The old knowledge roots our new ideas in what has worked in the past, and the new variations supply the novelty that is the hallmark of creativity. In creative endeavors, recognizing what to retain and what to reject can make the difference between success and failure.

Late one evening in April of 1983, Kary Mullis drove through winding hills to his ranch in northern California. Mullis was a biochemist employed by the Cetus Corporation to synthesize chemicals used in genetic cloning. The road wove to and fro through the hills, and the fragrance of wildflowers wafted in his window as Mullis toyed with notions in his mind. He had gotten an idea for a technique for working with chemical samples containing low amounts of DNA, and he was working out what might be wrong with his idea. In fact, his method would not have worked at all. Nonetheless, as he drove, the bumpiness of the road and the confinement of the car somehow seemed to encourage the chemical images as they continued to dance in his head, idly playing out possibilities. Then, in a sudden flash, an idea burst into his mind, an idea that would win him a Nobel prize and revolutionize the world of chemistry—the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).