CREATIVITY AND CAPACITY FOR REPRESENTATION: WHY ARE HUMANS SO CREATIVE?

Creativity depends on using our mental processes to create novelty. However fornovelty to be creative it must be effective. either in some practical sense. or in that it establishes a coherent set, where no relations. or a less coherent set of relations. existed before. Creativity may be defined. therefore. as the creation of effective novelty through the operation of our mental processes. It is a truism that human beings are the most creative systems we know. They are more creative than any machines invented so far. They are also more creative than other animals. and they become more creative as they develop. This is not to say that children are not creative. but the power of creative processes generally increases with development. Our problem then is to ask what it is about adult humans that confers on them such unique creative power.

[1]  M. Bitterman.  Toward a comparative psychology of learning. , 1960 .

[2]  J. Bain,et al.  Capacity Limitations in Children's Reasoning: A Dual-Task Approach. , 1986 .

[3]  Geoffrey E. Hinton.  Mapping Part-Whole Hierarchies into Connectionist Networks , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[4]  Geoffrey E. Hinton.  Tensor Product Variable Binding and the Representation of Symbolic Structures in Connectionist Systems , 1991 .

[5]  N. Schmajuk,et al.  Stimulus configuration, classical conditioning, and hippocampal function. , 1992, Psychological review.

[6]  M. Boden.  The creative mind : myths & mechanisms , 1991 .

[7]  John R. Anderson.  Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications , 1980 .

[8]  Janet Wiles,et al.  Parallel distributed processing approaches to creative reasoning: Tensor models of memory and analog , 1993 .

[9]  Graeme S. Halford,et al.  Modeling the development of reasoning strategies: The roles of analogy, knowledge, and capacity , 1995 .

[10]  Graeme S. Halford.  Acquisition of Reasoning: A Computational Model of Strategy Development in Transitive Inference. , 1992 .

[11]  J. Bain,et al.  Information-Processing Demands of Transitive Inference , 1986 .

[12]  Stephen J. Boies,et al.  Components of attention. , 1971 .

[13]  J. W. Rudy,et al.  Elemental and configural associations, the hippocampus and development , 1991 .

[14]  David C. Rubin,et al.  Rhyme and reason: Analyses of dual retrieval cues. , 1989 .

[15]  G. Halford.  Children's Understanding: The Development of Mental Models , 1993 .

[16]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy , 1983, Cogn. Sci..

[17]  G. Halford.  Analogical Reasoning and Conceptual Complexity in Cognitive Development , 1992 .

[18]  Janet Wiles,et al.  Memory retrieval with two cues: think of intersecting sets , 1993 .

[19]  Paul Thagard,et al.  Analogical Mapping by Constraint Satisfaction , 1989, Cogn. Sci..

[20]  David Premack,et al.  The codes of man and beasts , 1983, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[21]  M. Humphreys,et al.  Different Ways to Cue a Coherent Memory System: A Theory for Episodic, Semantic, and Procedural Tasks. , 1989 .

[22]  Paul Smolensky,et al.  Tensor Product Variable Binding and the Representation of Symbolic Structures in Connectionist Systems , 1990, Artif. Intell..