Psychological Basis of Creativity--论文代写范文精选

创造性的个体不仅注意到其他人的细节,这些细节得到存储可用。然而,大量的研究表明,创造力不仅包括散焦和自由的能力,而且还能够专注和集中。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
We have looked at several hypotheses to account for the cultural revolution of the Upper Paleolithic. Each has merit, but none provides a satisfying explanation for this burst of creativity. To determine more precisely what gave rise to the modern human mind, it is useful to examine the psychological basis of creativity.

Attributes of Creative Individuals
Martindale (1999) identified a cluster of attributes associated with high creativity. One is defocused attention: the tendency not to focus exclusively on the relevant aspects of a situation, but notice also seemingly irrelevant aspects (Dewing & Battye, 1971; Dykes & McGhie, 1976; Mendelsohn, 1976). A related attribute is high sensitivity (Martindale, 1977, 1999; Martindale & Armstrong, 1974), including sensitivity to subliminal impressions; stimuli that are perceived but of which one has no memory (Smith & Van de Meer, 1994).

Creative individuals also tend to have flat associative hierarchies (Mednick, 1962). The steepness of ones associative hierarchy is measured by comparing the number of words generated in response to stimulus words on a word association test. Those who generate few words for each stimulus have a steep associative hierarchy, whereas those who generate many have a flat associative hierarchy. Thus, once such an individual has run out of the more usual associations (e.g. chair in response to table), unusual ones (e.g. elbowin response to table) come to mind. The evidence that creativity is associated with both defocused attention and flat associative hierarchies suggests that creative individuals not only notice details others miss, but these details get stored in memory and are available later on.

However, a considerable body of research suggests that creativity involves not just the ability to defocus and free-associate, but also the ability to focus and concentrate (Barron, 1963; Eysenck, 1995; Feist, 1999; Fodor, 1995; Richards et al. 1988; Russ, 1993)[1]. As Feist (1999) puts it: It is not unbridled psychoticism that is most strongly associated with creativity, but psychoticism tempered by high ego strength or ego control. Paradoxically, creative people appear to be simultaneously very labile and mutable and yet can be rather controlled and stable (p. 288). He notes that, as Barron (1963) put it: The creative genius may be at once nave and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier yet adamantly saner than the average person (p. 224).

Phases of the Creative Process
How do we make sense of this seemingly paradoxical description of the creative individual? The evidence that creativity is associated with both defocused free-association and focused concentration is in fact consistent with the idea that the creative process consists of a generative phase followed by an evaluative phase (Boden, 1991; Dennett, 1978). Indeed there is an enduring notion that there are two kinds of thought, or that thought varies along a continuum between two extremes (Ashby & Ell, 2002; James, 1890/1950, Johnson-Laird, 1983; Neisser, 1963; Piaget, 1926; Rips, 2001; Sloman, 1996). Although the issue is still a subject of hot debate, the general picture emerging is as follows. 

At one end of the continuum is an intuitive, associative mode conducive to finding remote or subtle connections between items that are correlated but not necessarily causally related. This mode may yield an idea or problem solution, though perhaps in a vague, unpolished form. At the other end of the continuum is a rule-based, analytic mode of thought, conducive to analyzing relationships of cause and effect. This mode facilitates fine-tuning and manifestation of the creative work.

Contextual Focus Hypothesis
Let us now now look at a tentative explanation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process (Gabora, 2000, 2002a, 2002b; Gabora & Aerts, 2002). We take as a starting point some fairly well-established features of memory. According to the doctrine of neural re-entrance, the same memory locations get used again and again (Edelman, 1987). Each memory location is sensitive to a range of subsymbolic microfeatures (Smolensky, 1988), or values of them (Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992). Location A may respond preferentially to lines of a certain angle (say 90 degrees), neighboring location B respond preferentially to lines of a slightly different angle (say 91 degrees), and so forth. However, although location A responds maximally to lines of 90 degrees, it responds to a lesser degree to lines of 91 degrees. This kind of organization is referred to as coarse coding. The upshot is that storage of an item is distributed across a cell assembly that contains many locations, and likewise, each location participates in the storage of many items (Hinton, McClelland, & Rummelhart, 1986). Items stored in overlapping regions are correlated, or share features. Therefore memory is content addressable; there is a systematic relationship between the state of an input and the place it gets stored. Thus episodes stored in memory can thereafter be evoked by stimuli that are similar or resonant (Hebb, 1949; Marr, 1969).

Let us consider the significance of this memory architecture for creativity. To be constantly in a state of defocused attention, in which relevant dimensions of a situation do not stand out strongly from irrelevant ones, would be clearly impractical. It is only when one does not yet know what are the relevant dimensionsor when those assumed to be relevant turn out not to bethat defocused attention is of use. After the relevant dimensions have been found, it is most efficient to focus on them exclusively. Indeed it has been shown that in stimulus classification tasks, psychological space is stretched along dimensions that are useful for distinguishing members of different categories, and shrunk along nonpredictive dimensions (Nosofsky, 1987; Kruschke, 1993). 

In ALCOVE, a computer model of category learning, only when activation of each input unit was multiplied by an attentional gain factor did the output match the behavior of human subjects (Kruschke, 1992; Nosofsky & Kruschke, 1992). Thus learning and problem solving involve both (1) associating stimuli with outcomes, and (2) shifts in attention that determine how one parses the space. Let us refer to the situation in which many stimulus dimensions or aspects of a situation activate memory to an almost equal degree as a flat activation function, and the situation in one focuses exclusively on one stimulus dimension, or aspect of a situation, as a spiky activation function. We refer to the ability to spontaneously adjust the shape of the activation function in response to the situation at hand as the capacity for contextual focus.

Let us now explore the possibility that creative individuals are not always in a state of defocused attention, but that they can enter this state when useful (such as in a word association test). Thus when one encounters a problem or inconsistency, or seeks self-expression, one enters a state of defocused attention conducive to associative thought through a flattening of the activation function. More diverse memory locations get activated and provide ingredients for the next thought. Because of the distributed, content-addressable structure of memory, a seemingly irrelevant element of the situation may evoke an episode from memory that shares this element. The connection between them may inspire a new idea.

The vague idea generated in a defocused state is clarified by focusing attention on the new connection and shifting to a more analytic mode. The activation function becomes spikier, and the region searched and retrieved from narrower. This continues until, to use Posner's (1964) terms, one has filtered out the irrelevant dimensions and condensed the relevant ones.
In sum, it is proposed that the capacity for contextual focus is the distinguishing feature of the modern human mind, and the reason for the cultural revolution of the Upper Paleolithic.

Summary and Discussion
The period of history that exhibits the most impressive cultural transition is the Upper Paleolithic. To gain insight into what caused this unprecedented explosion of creativity, it is useful to examine the creative process. Creative individuals are prone to states of defocused attention, and tend toward flat associative hierarchies, suggesting a proclivity for associative thought. However, creativity involves not just an intuitive, associative mode of thought, but also an analytic, evaluative mode. This suggests that creativity requires the ability to shift between these modes.
Thus it is tentatively proposed that the arrival of art, science, religion, and likely also complex language and a restructuring of social relationships in the Upper Paleolithic was due to the onset of contextual focus: the capacity to focus or defocus attention in response to the situation, thereby shifting between analytic and associative modes of thought. New ideas germinate in a defocused state in which one is receptive to the possible relevance of many dimensions of a situation. They are refined in a focused state, conducive to filtering out irrelevant dimensions and condensing relevant ones.

Contextual focus is not a matter of more memory, but of a more sophisticated way of using memory; thus the proposal is consistent with there being no increase in brain size at this time. It is consistent with a point made by Bickerton (1990) and Leakey (1984) that brain size cannot be equated with intelligence. However it deviates from Bickerton's perspective in that it is not language per se that made the difference, but rather a kind of cognitive functioning that made not only language possible, but all aspects of group survival that can benefit from being considered from different perspectives and at different degrees of abstraction. It does not require that modules be connected, but merely simultaneously accessible.

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