creators_name: Gabora, Liane editors_name: Hewett, Thomas editors_name: Kavanagh, Terence type: confpaper datestamp: 2002-10-22 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:05 metadata_visibility: show title: Cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process ispublished: pub subjects: cog-psy subjects: comp-sci-neural-nets subjects: comp-sci-art-intel subjects: behav-neuro-sci full_text_status: public keywords: Associative hierarchy, bisociation, brainstorm, concepts, conjunction, context, creativity, defocused attention, distributed representation, emergent features, evaluation, focus, generativity, idea, impossibilist creativity, intuition, variable focus. abstract: This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many memory locations. Because of the distributed, content-addressable structure of memory, the diverse contents of these many locations merge to generate the next thought. Novel associations often result. As one focuses on an idea, the region searched and retrieved from narrows, such that the next thought is the product of fewer memory locations. This enables a shift from association-based to causation-based thinking, which facilitates the fine-tuning and manifestation of the creative work. date: 2002 date_type: published publisher: acm Press pagerange: 126-133 refereed: TRUE referencetext: 1. Abeles, M. & Bergman, H. Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. Journal of Neurophysiology 70 , 4 (1993), 1629-1638. 2. Barron, F. Creativity and Psychological Health, Van Nostrand, 1963. 3. Boden, M. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Revised edition, Cardinal, 1990/1992. 4. Bowers, K.S. & Keeling, K.R. Heart-rate variability in creative functioning. 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