Creative cognition: A multidisciplinary and integrative framework of creative thinking

Extant research provides vast information on antecedents to creativity. However, creative thinking is oftentimes treated as a black box, requiring input and producing creative output. Cognitive processes occurring during creative thinking tend to be neglected, although they can provide a bridge between the inputs to creativity and the resulting outputs. Literature offers different perspectives on creative thinking processes, such as the separation of divergent and convergent thinking, different stages of creativity or the concept of creative cognition. This variety of concepts underlying creativity has led to confusion and misinterpretations of some concepts. Moreover, the overemphasis on creative outcomes and divergent thinking has resulted in a neglect of a more comprehensive view on cognitive dimensions of creativity. Through reviewing and synthesizing multidisciplinary literature on creativity, an integrative framework is developed positioning cognitive elements of creativity within a system including organizational antecedents to creativity and creative outcomes. The framework seeks to offer pathways to increasingly incorporate the concept of creative cognition into future research. Suggesting different forms of creative cognition that individuals engage in during creative thought, this theoretical work further offers a theoretical development of creativity concepts that intends to inspire future research designs and facilitates cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer.     

How Does Cognitive Conflict in Design Teams Support the Development of Creative Ideas?

Is cognitive conflict detrimental to the development of innovative ideas in design teams, or is it a precondition for innovative performance? Assuming that there is a relationship between cognitive conflict and innovation, what kind of strategies do teams use in situations of cognitive conflict and what are the consequences for creativity? This paper reports on a study analysing how design teams cope with cognitive conflict during idea generation in an experiment. The design process was captured in protocols that were generated from video recordings. We report the results of the analysis of verbal protocols according to the five styles of (cognitive) conflict behaviour: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. Out of six teams, the results of the two highest and two lowest scoring teams are compared as regards innovation and functionality, which we see as the two components of creative outcomes. We show that design teams, even in a laboratory environment, encounter a considerable amount of cognitive conflict. A statistical comparison between the groups with the highest and the lowest innovative/functional design concept scores reveals significant differences in their conflict behaviour styles. The high innovation and high functionality groups used a more competing and a more compromising style, whereas groups rated low on the same parameters used a more collaborating style. The high rating groups on both creativity components used a more associating and rejecting behaviour style; the high innovation groups also generated more new ideas than the low innovation groups. The low rating groups on both innovation and functionality tended to repeat ideas more frequently. The main finding is that, in contrast with reports in previous research, the groups with higher innovation and functionality scores collaborated less than their peers in the low rating groups on these parameters. We interpret these results as signifying that creative performance in teams is not achieved mainly by agreement but needs cognitive confrontation.     

A framework for understanding creativity in requirements engineering

Creativity is important in the discovery and analysis of user and business requirements to achieve innovative uses of information and communication technologies. This paper builds a theoretical framework for understanding creativity in requirements engineering. The framework provides a systematic means of understanding creativity in requirements engineering and comprises five elements (product, process, domain, people and socio-organisational context). The framework provides researchers with a sound basis for exploring how the five elements of creativity can be incorporated within RE methods and techniques to support creative requirements engineering. It provides practitioners with a systematic means of creating environments that nurture and develop creative people, cognitive and collaborative processes and products.     

How do Individual‐Level Factors Affect the Creative Solution Formation Process of Teams?

The generation of creative solutions involves nonlinear dynamic procedures that can only be achieved through the creativity of individual team members. Thus, it is important to understand how the formation of individual‐level creativity factors influence the creative solution formation process. The creative solution formation process can be divided into four phases: idea generation, idea screening, idea development and solution verification. Prior research suggests that the creative process may be affected by motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic), knowledge stock (explicit and tacit), individual creativity (intelligence and divergent thinking), and pressure (challenge and time). We tested the effects of these eight factors on performance in the idea generation and idea development phases by conducting an experiment. Our results indicate that intrinsic motivation, intelligence and divergent thinking have a significant positive effect on both idea generation and idea development. Tacit knowledge and challenge pressure have a significant positive effect on idea generation. Time pressure has a significant negative effect on idea development. We also show that both idea generation and idea development have a significant impact on the quality of the final creative solution.     

广告创意教学过程中发散性思维的探讨

广告创意是广告设计教学中最为重要的一个部分。广告创意是一个创造性的思维活动过程,而创造力是推动设计不断进步的重要动力。在人的创造性思维运动过程中,起主导作用的就是发散性思维。训练学生的发散性思维对其广告创作有极大的帮助。     

Interview: Paul Paulus on Group Creativity

Paul Paulus is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington. Paul Paulus's research interests revolve around Group Creativity: On the one hand, creative processes are often conceptualized as individual‐level phenomena. On the other hand, complex problems in innovation management often need the collaboration of various experts to create novel solutions. Interestingly, although common sense suggests that individuals are more creative in a group context, research indicates that this is oftentimes not the case. The question on how to structure creative processes in groups in such a way that groups can actually benefit from their creative potential is therefore crucial. Paul Paulus has spent much of his academic career addressing this intriguing question. He and his research team have discovered many factors that influence group creativity and have been able to demonstrate conditions under which group interaction enhances creativity. For the past eight years he has been working with a multidisciplinary team to better understand the cognitive, neural and social factors that underlie the group creative process (Paulus et al., 2010 ). They are presently funded on a three year project to investigate innovation processes in networks.     

The Impact of Technology on Creativity in Design: An Enhancement?

Technology may be considered as an interface between individuals and the products they create, but we have to determine whether the use of new systems effectively enhance individuals' creative activities. In this paper, we present a new angle of reflection that we illustrate in the field of creative design, since it is a constant challenge for designers to introduce creativity in the projects they work on. The approach we propose is centred on designers' cognitive processes. We argue that both the development of new CAD (computer‐aided design) systems and their assessment should be conducted on the basis of a deep understanding of designers' cognitive processes. In accordance with this view, we present three empirical studies that were conducted in order to analyse the impact of new design support systems on designers' cognitive processes. Therefore, the results we present contribute to further our knowledge of whether new CAD technologies effectively facilitate designers' activities and enhance their creativity.     

Hierarchical reinforcement learning as creative problem solving

Although creativity is studied from philosophy to cognitive robotics, a definition has proven elusive. We argue for emphasizing the creative process (the cognition of the creative agent), rather than the creative product (the artifact or behavior). Owing to developments in experimental psychology, the process approach has become an increasingly attractive way of characterizing creative problem solving. In particular, the phenomenon of insight, in which an individual arrives at a solution through a sudden change in perspective, is a crucial component of the process of creativity.These developments resonate with advances in machine learning, in particular hierarchical and modular approaches, as the field of artificial intelligence aims for general solutions to problems that typically rely on creativity in humans or other animals. We draw a parallel between the properties of insight according to psychology and the properties of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) systems for embodied agents. Using the Creative Systems Framework developed by Wiggins and Ritchie, we analyze both insight and HRL, establishing that they are creative in similar ways. We highlight the key challenges to be met in order to call an artificial system “insightful”.     

Separation of circulating tokens

Self-stabilizing distributed control is often modeled by token abstractions. A system with a single token may implement mutual exclusion; a system with multiple tokens may ensure that immediate neighbors do not simultaneously enjoy a privilege. In models of process control, tokens may represent physical objects whose movement is controlled. The problem studied in this paper is to ensure that a synchronous system with m circulating tokens has at least d distance between tokens. This problem is first considered in a ring where d is given whilst m and the ring size n are unknown. The protocol solving this problem can be uniform, with all processes running the same program, or it can be non-uniform, with some processes acting only as token relays. The protocol for this first problem is simple, and can be expressed with a Petri net formalism. A second problem is to maximize d when m is given, and n is unknown. For the second problem, this paper presents a non-uniform protocol with a single corrective process.     

Creative conceptual design: Extending the scope by infused design

Many methods that support human creativity by manual or computational means have been proposed in the past. They rely on the assumption that following a certain process of reasoning might lead to generating ideas considered creative. We start by defining creativity as a capability that enables the creation of systems that are patentable. We review the state-of-the-art of creative conceptual design and organize it with a framework. Subsequently, we present a method called infused design that guarantees the generation of design solutions by transforming systems and methods from remote disciplines. In many cases, these solutions would be deemed creative. Finding these systems and their transformations is done through a process based on the underlying discrete mathematical representation. This process is partially supported by a computer tool.We describe the method of infused design and illustrate its operation through part of the results achieved until now, including designing a new active torque amplifier system. We further demonstrate its benefits through other examples. We discuss the relation of infused design with other creativity or design methods and conclude with future developments of the method.“A well-directed imagination is the source of great deeds.”Chinese proverb     

Emotions as Constraining and Facilitating Factors for Creativity: Companionate Love and Anger

Generally the literature has favoured the notion that positive affect facilitates creative performance. However, a recent critical review has demonstrated that negative affect can enhance cognitive performance and improve motivation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, previous research comparing positive and negative affect as either a facilitator of or a constraint on creativity factors has rested primarily on the valence approach. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. This paper explores the effects of two common specific emotions elicited in work team processes, anger and companionate love, on individual creativity, with the cognitive‐activation and the functions‐of‐emotions perspectives. The results from our experiment demonstrate that positive emotions can constrain and negative emotions can foster creative performance. More specifically, we found that companionate love constrains creativity, whereas anger facilitates it. Furthermore, our qualitative analyses of interviews with employees justify the implications of the experimental results in an organizational context. Our findings suggest that nurturing a moderate degree of hostility towards opposing ideas from others in an idea‐generation process while concurrently encouraging thoughtfulness in an idea‐implementation process can facilitate managing organizational innovation processes.     

Coordination problem in cognitive wireless mesh networks

Due to their potential to create and extend pervasive communication applications to cognitive environments with distributed control, the emerging technology of cognitive wireless mesh networks is gaining significant attention from a growing research community. However, the major challenge in cognitive networks is the adaptation to time and space variability of the available resources, namely chunks of the frequency spectrum called channels. In particular, this problem is exacerbated in cognitive mesh networks because there exists no direct communication among devices which thereby cannot establish a global (common) control channel to coordinate the entire network. Instead, only local control channels that vary depending on the time instant and location, can be established to coordinate cognitive devices among themselves. This paper first analyzes the underlying challenges and existing approaches to address the absence of a static and global control channel, and then propose a novel Control channel formation protocol, called Connor. Our protocol Connor is a fully distributed coordination scheme where cognitive mesh devices self-organize into clusters based on the similarity of available channels and on topological constraints. Compared with the existing clustering algorithms, which requires synchronization, the proposed Connor performs better in most cases without imposing synchronization.     

Spaces for Creativity and Innovation in Two Established Organizations

Organizational work environments are increasingly strategically designed to support creativity and innovation processes, although a consistent theoretical frame for such an endeavour has not been developed yet. Creativity‐ and innovation‐oriented design of work environments requires an understanding of the principles of the underlying processes and their spatial implications. Both creativity and innovation processes are complex and display in different phases convergent and divergent characteristics. The processes are dependent on both individual and group effort. In this article these dimensions are discussed from a theoretical perspective and are used for evaluating the two cases presented here. The first case, the Interactive Creativity Landscape as integral part of the Fraunhofer Office Innovation Center in Germany has been designed interpreting the convergent and divergent phases of creative processes. The second case, the Learning Garden of a Scandinavian financial institution has been designed having de Bono's procedure in mind. The article concludes with the suggestion that increasingly organizations will offer diversity for spatially supporting creativity and innovation processes; solutions will be manifold but will follow certain principles – some of which are discussed here.     

Utilizing sensor data to model students’ creativity in a digital environment

While creativity is essential for developing students’ broad expertise in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields, many students struggle with various aspects of being creative. Digital technologies have the unique opportunity to support the creative process by (1) recognizing elements of students’ creativity, such as when creativity is lacking (modeling step), and (2) providing tailored scaffolding based on that information (intervention step). However, to date little work exists on either of these aspects. Here, we focus on the modeling step. Specifically, we explore the utility of various sensing devices, including an eye tracker, a skin conductance bracelet, and an EEG sensor, for modeling creativity during an educational activity, namely geometry proof generation. We found reliable differences in sensor features characterizing low vs. high creativity students. We then applied machine learning to build classifiers that achieved good accuracy in distinguishing these two student groups, providing evidence that sensor features are valuable for modeling creativity.     

Students’ perceptions of creativity in learning Information Technology (IT) in project groups

This paper explores students’ perceptions of creativity in learning Information Technology (IT) in project groups and the implications of better educating creative IT students for the future. Theoretically, the extension of social psychology research into creativity lays the basis of bringing creativity, learning and IT education into one framework. Empirically, qualitative interviews were carried out with 48 students from three disciplines, including Computer Science (n = 16), Electronic Systems (n = 15) and Medialogy (n = 17) at Aalborg University (AAU) in Denmark, which has a tradition of using problem-based learning (PBL) in student project groups. According to the findings, the students’ perceptions of creativity reflect their domain-related conceptualization and tacit learning experience, with different levels of confidence of being creative persons. As IT plays multiple roles in developing students’ creativity, it can be regarded as a ‘learning partner’. This implies that in the future creativity should be taught more explicitly, helping students to become creative IT talents as a part of their professional identity. It also requires teaching efforts to build a learning environment that stimulates creativity more effectively through more interactions between learners, learning tasks and learning tools.     

Virtual reality application influences cognitive load-mediated creativity components and creative performance in engineering design

Virtual reality (VR) can promote design performance, and may generate a high cognitive load and affect creative design thinking as well. In order to examine the effect of VR application on cognitive load and engineering design creativity, this study recruited 81 eighth-grade students as participants and employed a non-equivalent-groups quasi-experimental design to examine how VR application influences creativity components and creative performance. A creativity component scale (creative motivation, creative thinking, and professional cognition), a measurement of creative performance, and a cognitive load scale were used to collect data. The study also investigated the ability of VR application to predict creativity components and creative performance, using cognitive load as the mediator. The conclusions are as follows: (1) VR application had marked effects on professional cognition and creative motivation but no effect on creative thinking skills. (2) VR application had marked effects on the novelty and usefulness aspects of creative performance, particularly with respect to usefulness. (3) VR application had marked effects on extraneous and germane cognitive load, but no influence on intrinsic cognitive load, and (4) Both VR application and cognitive load were able to predict creativity components and creative performance. Their abilities to predict creative performance approached an acceptable level. Nevertheless, VR application had no effect on general creative thinking skills; therefore, other teaching strategies are needed to strengthen creative thinking.     

Creativity (Ideas) Management in Industrial R&D Organizations: A Crea‐Political Process Model and an Empirical Illustration of Corus RD&T

Creativity management is a crucial topic to consider in the debate about the innovative research department. Against the background of discussions about individual creativity and organizational commitment, this article argues that the creative process in organizations is a matter of political strategies. The ideator literally has to sell his/her idea. The article therefore comes up with a crea‐political process model in which there is ample room for the thought that ideas emerge and survive within a social‐political context. In addition, the crea‐political process model is used to analyse the way in which the Corus Group Research Development and Technology (RD&T) department has implemented an electronic idea‐management system. The system, called eureka!, has been designed as a straightforward platform to capture, review, evaluate and select creative ideas. The findings challenge the literature on idea management in organizations to consider the political activities of ideators in the whole process of creativity.     

What can economic coordination do for creativity and well-being?

The scope of this paper is contributing to unveiling how economic organizing can be more humanistic by delving into ideas of well-being and advancing them through the concepts of creativity. Accordingly, our contribution reflects on how designing and implementing organizations and processes inspired to creativity can ameliorate the life of participants. We therefore analyse issues of economic coordination through fundamental mechanisms elaborated by organizational economists (market exchange, organized hierarchies) and associate them with diverse consequences in terms of creative capacity. Illustrations are taken from the creative sectors. The creativity dimension (as an outcome) assumes especial relevance in our analysis, not only or primarily because of its potential link with competitiveness and economic prosperity (as in the current economic approach to creativity) but mostly because of the connections with the creation of a public good in the form of well-being and value for the public.     

Evocation Processes by Novice and Expert Designers: Towards Stimulating Analogical Thinking

Design activity occurs in many professions, ranging from technical to more artistic domains. Whatever the domain, it is a constant challenge for designers to introduce creativity in each design project they work on and minimize the tendency to repeat familiar design features. The goal of this paper is to present a cognitive approach to design problem solving as well as an experimental study. This study aims at determining whether creative ideas can be enhanced by the presentation of external sources of inspiration. In particular, we analyse the effect of the presentation of different kinds of sources (intra‐ versus interdomain sources, which are presented as graphical representations or as verbal labels) according to the designers’ level of expertise (lay‐designers versus professionals). Results show that it is possible to enhance evocation processes in design, but that it is dependent on both the nature of sources of inspiration and the designers’ level of expertise. Based on these results, we suggest ways for enhancing creative ideas in design tasks.     

认知演化算法

受人类创造性思维过程的启发,借鉴认知心理学和创新计算的研究成果,提出了一种模拟人类基于创造性思维的问题求解过程和行为的智能算法--认知演化算法.该算法以知识为核心,将问题求解看成一个基于知识的创造性思维过程,对发散思维、收敛思维、记忆、执行、学习和价值体系6个关键模块进行了建模,充分发挥了知识演化和基于知识的创造性思维技巧在问题求解中的作用.通过数值实验分析了CEA各参数对算法性能的影响,并以一个扩展的路径优化问题将CEA与经典的智能算法进行了比较.实验结果表明,针对知识密集型优化问题,该算法能够以较少的目标评价次数得到问题的较优解.