Age-related differences in cognitive processes were used to understand agerelated declines in creativity. According to the Geneplore model (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992), there are two phases of creativity — generating an idea and exploring the implications of the idea — each with different underlying cognitive processes. These two phases are measured in the Creative Invention Task (CIT; Finke, 1...

Creative processes are widely believed to involve the generation of multiple, discrete, well-defined possibilities followed by exploration and selection. An alternative, inspired by parallel distributed processing models of associative memory, is that creativity involves the merging and interference of memory items resulting in a single cognitive structure that is ill-defined, and can thus be s...

An innovation is the materialization of a novel idea. The individual mental creation must be followed by institutional and social processes. Also the mental creation is not purely individual but emerges within a culture and an economic milieu. Innovative change could be serendipitous, even serendipity, however, Pasteur remarked, is not fortuitous, but requires readiness to capture it and transf...

I present a hypothetical global model of everyday creative cognition located within Baars’ Global Workspace Theory, based on theories of predictive cognition and specific work on statistical modelling of music perception. The key idea is a proposal for regulating access to the Global Workspace, overcoming what Baars calls the Threshold Paradox. This idea is motivated as a general mechanism for ...

Many species engage in acts that could be called creative (J.C. Kaufman & A.B. Kaufman, 2004). However, human creativity is unique in that it has completely transformed the planet we live on. We build skyscrapers, play breathtaking cello sonatas, send ourselves into space, and even decode our own DNA. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, wha...