Cognitive processes in creative contexts

Creativity depends on how people think. Obviously, it depends on many other factors as well, such as the environment, one's culture, and individual abilities (e.g., Sternberg 1988). Nonetheless, mental processes are, in our view, the essence and the engine of creative endeavors. Although there are many useful and productive ap-proaches to understanding creativity, the creative cognition approach (Finke, Ward, and Smith 1992) focuses on the cognitive processes and structures that underlie creative thinking. This book unites the theo-retical ideas and research findings of cognitive scientists who have studied various aspects of creative cognition. One basic goal of the creative cognition approach is to improve understanding of creative processes by using the methods and con-cepts of cognitive science. Most of the contributors to this book would agree, however, that there is no single process that we can identify as the creative process. Instead, creative thinking encompasses special combinations and patterns of the same cognitive processes seen in other noncreative endeavors. A second goal of the creative cognition approach is to learn more and raise new questions about cognition by examining it in creative contexts. For example, research on how creative thinking is inhibited or blocked may stimulate new ideas about how noncreative thinking is inhibited. The creative use of categories may yield insights about the way categories in general are represented. Theoretical models for inducing new ideas may have implications for models of text compre-hension. Just as ecological approaches have uncovered important properties of cognition by examining it in naturalistic contexts (Neisser 1982), so, too, does a creative cognition approach suggest new ideas about cognition by placing it in a creative context. The creative cognition approach has roots in associationism (Thorn