title: Cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process creator: Gabora, Liane subject: Cognitive Psychology subject: Neural Nets subject: Artificial Intelligence subject: Behavioral Neuroscience description: 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. publisher: acm Press contributor: Hewett, Thomas contributor: Kavanagh, Terence date: 2002 type: Conference Paper type: PeerReviewed format: text/html identifier: http://cogprints.org/2546/1/CandC.htm identifier: Gabora, Liane (2002) Cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process. [Conference Paper] relation: http://cogprints.org/2546/