How scientists think: On-line creativity and conceptual change in science

This is an investigation of " Online Creativity. " I will present a new account of the cognitive and social mechanisms underlying complex thinking of creative scientists as they work on significant problems in contemporary science. I will lay out an innovative methodology that I have developed for investigating creative and complex thinking in a real-world context. Using this method, I have discovered that there are a number of strategies that are used in contemporary science that increase the likelihood of scientists making discoveries. The findings reported in this chapter provide new insights into complex scientific thinking and will dispel many of the myths surrounding the generation of new concepts and scientific discoveries. InVivo cognition: A new way of investigating cognition There is a large background in cognitive research on thinking, reasoning and problem solving processes that form the foundation for creative cognition (see Dunbar, in press, Holyoak 1996 for recent reviews). However, to a large extent, research on reasoning has demonstrated that subjects in psychology experiments make vast numbers of thinking and reasoning errors even in the most simple problems. How is creative thought even possible if people make so many reasoning errors? One problem with research on reasoning is that the concepts and stimuli that the subjects are asked to use are often arbitrary and involve no background knowledge (cf. Dunbar, 1995; Klahr & Dunbar, 1988). I have proposed that one way of determining what reasoning errors are specific and which are general is to investigate cognition in the cognitive laboratory and the real world (Dunbar, 1995). Psychologists should conduct both InVitro and InVivo research to understand thinking. InVitro research is the standard psychological experiment where subjects are brought into the laboratory and controlled experiments are conducted. As can be seen from the research reported in this volume, this approach yields many insights into the psychological mechanisms underlying complex thinking. The use of an InVivo methodology in which online thinking and reasoning are investigated in a real-world context yields fundamental insights into the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying complex cognition and creativity. The results of InVivo cognitive research can then be used as a basis for further InVitro work in which controlled experiments are conducted. In this chapter, I will outline some of the results of my ongoing InVivo research on creative scientific thinking and relate this research back to the more common InVitro research and show that the …