From Simple Machines to Eureka in Four Not-So-Easy Steps: Towards Creative Visuospatial Intelligence

Abstract

This chapter builds an account of the cognitive abilities and mechanisms required to produce creative problem-solving and insight. Such mechanisms are identified in an essentialized set of human abilities: making visuospatial inferences, creatively solving problems involving object affordances, using experience with previously solved problems to find solutions for new problems, generating new concepts out of old ones. Each such cognitive ability is selected to suggests a principle necessary for the harder feat of engineering insight. The features such abilities presuppose in a cognitive system are addressed. A core set of mechanisms able to support such features is proposed. A unified system framework in line with cognitive research is suggested, in which the knowledge-encoding supports the variety of such processes efficiently.