Creative cognition as a window on creativity.

The creative cognition approach views creativity as the generation of novel and appropriate products through the application of basic cognitive processes to existing knowledge structures. It relies on converging evidence from anecdotal accounts of creativity and tightly controlled laboratory studies designed to examine the processes that are assumed to operate in those anecdotes. Specific examples of creative cognition studies are described in detail with a particular focus on research concerned with accessing conceptual information at varying levels of abstraction and combining previously separate concepts.

The role of graded category structure in imaginative thought.

Participants generated lists of exemplars from the categories of animals, tools, and fruit, and their lists were used to determine the relative accessibility of individual exemplars. Measures of accessibility included output dominance (the number of participants who listed an exemplar), rank (how early instances were listed), and two scores that reflect their combination-output precedence and dominance/rank. Other participants drew and described novel exemplars of those categories that might exist on an imaginary planet and reported on the factors that influenced their creations.

Whenis category learning holistic?

Ward and Scott (1987) recently provided evidence consistent with the idea that category learning can occur analytically whether that learning takes place under intentional or incidental conditions and whether the learner is an adult or a young child. Kemler Nelson (1988) raised concerns about Ward and Scott's conclusions as well as about the logic of some of their arguments. Kemler Nelson also attempted to strengthen the argument that incidental learning conditions induce a less strategic approach to tasks, which necessarily results in a holistic mode of processing.