Exploring the Relationship Between the Processes of Abstraction and Creativity

Abstract

Making things, coming up with strange new ideas is what creativity is. The question of where these new ideas come from is the very question that drives all study of creativity. Creativity has to come from the knowledge that exists in the minds of the creator [1]. This work participates in the questions of how we come up with new ideas and to what extent the conceptual space influences creativity. We form concepts through the process of abstraction. Despite having been long established that creativity does not come from the Gods but from our mental and bodily processes, there is very little work on the processes of concept acquisition. There is almost no work that directly studies creativity and abstraction together. This work argues that creativity research assumes an Amodal Symbol cognition structure where the processes of cognition and higher cognitive functions are not related. As a result this relationship has not been explored. This work employs a mixed method approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods for coding and analysis of abstractions and creative generations. A wordlist based on familiarity, level of abstractness and modality experience was created. A norming study of the rating of abstractness of these words showed significant variability in ratings indicating subjectivity in the perception of abstractness. To study abstractness and creativity a Property Generation and an Alternate Uses task was conducted. Traditional theories of creativity assume we manipulate taxonomic or entity properties in a computer like way, during the process of creativity, however our results emphasises the role of individual experiences in the process of creativity