arXiv subjects

Liane Gabora

Publications and source records attributed to Liane Gabora.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

The Beer Can Theory of Creativity

This chapter explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying the emergence and evolution of cultural novelty. Section Two summarizes the rationale for viewing the process by which the fruits of the mind take shape as they spread from one individual to another as a form of evolution, and briefly discusses a computer model of this process. Section Three presents theoretical and empirical evidence that the sudden proliferation of human culture approximately two million years ago began with the capacity for creativity: that is, the ability to generate novelty strategically and contextually. The next two sections take a closer look at the creative process. Section Four examines the mechanisms underlying the fluid, associative thought that constitutes the inspirational component of creativity. Section Five explores how that initial flicker of inspiration crystallizes into a solid, workable idea as it gets mulled over in light of the various constraints and affordances of the world into which it will be born. Finally, Section Six wraps things up with a few speculative thoughts about the overall unfolding of this evolutionary process.

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arXiv2019

Meme and Variations: A Computer Model of Cultural Evolution

Holland's (1975) genetic algorithm is a minimal computer model of natural selection that made it possible to investigate the effect of manipulating specific parameters on the evolutionary process. If culture is, like biology, a form of evolution, it should be possible to similarly abstract the underlying skeleton of the process and develop a minimal model of it. Meme and Variations, or MAV, is a computational model, inspired by the genetic algorithm, of how ideas evolve in a society of interacting individuals (Gabora 1995). The name is a pun on the classical music form 'theme and variations', because it is based on the premise that novel ideas are variations of old ones; they result from tweaking or combining existing ideas in new ways (Holland et al. 1981). MAV explores the impact of biological phenomena such as over-dominance and epistasis as well as cognitive and social phenomena such as the ability to learn generalizations or imitate others on the fitness and diversity of cultural transmissible actions.

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arXiv2019

Evidence that Cross-Domain Re-interpretations of Creative Ideas are Recognizable

The goal of this study was to investigate the translate-ability of creative works into other domains. We tested whether people were able to recognize which works of art were inspired by which pieces of music. Three expert painters created four paintings, each of which was the artist's interpretation of one of four different pieces of instrumental music. Participants were able to identify which paintings were inspired by which pieces of music at statistically significant above-chance levels. The findings support the hypothesis that creative ideas can exist in an at least somewhat domain-independent state of potentiality and become more well-defined as they are actualized in accordance with the constraints of a particular domain.

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arXiv2019

Incorporating characteristics of human creativity into an evolutionary art algorithm

A perceived limitation of evolutionary art and design algorithms is that they rely on human intervention; the artist selects the most aesthetically pleasing variants of one generation to produce the next. This paper discusses how computer generated art and design can become more creatively human-like with respect to both process and outcome. As an example of a step in this direction, we present an algorithm that overcomes the above limitation by employing an automatic fitness function. The goal is to evolve abstract portraits of Darwin, using our 2nd generation fitness function which rewards genomes that not just produce a likeness of Darwin but exhibit certain strategies characteristic of human artists. We note that in human creativity, change is less choosing amongst randomly generated variants and more capitalizing on the associative structure of a conceptual network to hone in on a vision. We discuss how to achieve this fluidity algorithmically.

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arXiv2019

Distilling the Essence of an Evolutionary Process and Implications for a Formal Description of Culture

It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture evolve in the same genuine sense as biological life? And if so, does it evolve through natural selection, or by some other means? Why does no other species remotely approach the degree of cultural complexity of humans? These questions lie at the foundation of who we are and what makes our lives meaningful. Although much research has been done on how selective pressures operating at the biological level affect cognition and culture, little research has focused on culture as an evolutionary process in its own right. Like biological forms, cultural forms-ideas, attitudes, artifacts, mannerisms, etc.-incrementally adapt to the constraints and affordances of their environment through descent with modification. In some respects culture appears to be Darwinian, i.e., a process of differential replication and selection amongst randomly generated variants. This suggests that knowledge of biological evolution can be put to use to gain insight into culture. However, attempts to apply Darwinian theory to culture have not yielded the kind of unifying framework for the social sciences that it provided for the biological sciences, largely because of the nonrandom manner in which the mind-the hub of cultural change-generates and assimilates novelty. This paper investigates how and when humans became capable of supporting culture, and what previously held it back, focusing on how we attained the creative powers we now possess. To invent in the strategic, intuitive manner characteristic of humans requires a cognitive architecture that supports the capacity to spontaneously adapt concepts to new circumstances and merge them together to conceptualize new situations.

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arXiv2019

Toward a Theory of Creative Inklings

It is perhaps not so baffling that we have the ability to develop, refine, and manifest a creative idea, once it has been conceived. But what sort of a system could spawn the initial seed of creativity from which an idea grows? This paper looks at how the mind is structured in such a way that we can experience a glimmer of insight or inkling of artistic inspiration.

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arXiv2019

A Conceptual Network-Based Approach to Inferring the Cultural Evolutionary History of the Baltic Psaltery

The application of conventional phylogenetic techniques for inferring cultural history is problematic due to differences in the nature of information transmission in biological and cultural realms. In culture, units of transmission are not just measurable attributes, but communicable concepts. Therefore, relatedness amongst cultural elements often resides at the conceptual level not captured by traditional phylogenetic methods. This paper takes a cognitively inspired approach to analyzing material cultural history. We show that combining data for physical attributes of cultural artifacts with conceptual information can uncover cultural influences among different ethnolinguistic groups, and reveal new patterns of cultural ancestry. Using the Baltic psaltery, a musical instrument with a well-documented ethnographic and archaeological record, we recovered a previously unacknowledged pattern of historical relationship that is more congruent with geographical distribution and temporal data than is obtained with other approaches.

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arXiv2019

Why the Creative Process is Not Darwinian

Simonton (2006) makes the unwarranted assumption that nonmonotonicity supports a Darwinian view of creativity. Darwin's theory of natural selection was motivated by a paradox that has no equivalent in creative thought: the paradox of how change accumulates when acquired traits are not inherited. To describe a process of cumulative change in which acquired traits are retained is outside of the scope of the theory of natural selection. Even the early evolution of life itself (prior to genetically mediated template replication) cannot be described by natural selection. Specifically, natural selection cannot describe change of state that involves horizontal (Lamarckian) exchange, or occurs through interaction with an incompletely specified context. It cannot describe change wherein variants are evaluated sequentially, and wherein this evaluation can itself change the state space and/or fitness function, because no two variants are ever evaluated according to the same selection criterion. Concerns are also raised as to the methodology used in Simonton's study.

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arXiv2019

Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Creative Process

This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many memory locations. Because of the distributed, content-addressable structure of memory, the diverse contents of these many locations merge to generate the next thought. Novel associations often result. As one focuses on an idea, the region searched and retrieved from narrows, such that the next thought is the product of fewer memory locations. This enables a shift from association-based to causation-based thinking, which facilitates the fine-tuning and manifestation of the creative work.

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arXiv2019

Reframing Convergent and Divergent Thought for the 21st Century

Convergent thought is defined and measured in terms of the ability to perform on tasks where there is a single correct solution, and divergent thought is defined and measured in terms of the ability to generate multiple different solutions. However, this characterization of them presents inconsistencies, and despite that they are promoted as key constructs of creativity, they do not capture the capacity to reiteratively modify an idea in light of new perspectives arising out of an overarching conceptual framework. Research on formal models of concepts and their interactions suggests that different creative outputs may be projections of the same underlying idea at different phases of this kind of 'honing' process. This leads us to redefine convergent thought as thought in which the relevant concepts are considered from conventional contexts, and divergent thought as thought in which they are considered from unconventional contexts. Implications for the assessment of creativity are discussed.

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arXiv2019

Why Cognitive Science is Needed for a Viable Theoretical Framework for Cultural Evolution

Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire are regularly discarded at the end of the lifetime of the individuals that acquired them. While the rationale for framing culture as an evolutionary process is correct, it does not follow that culture is a Darwinian or selectionist process, or that population genetics provides viable starting points for modeling cultural change. This paper lays out step-by-step arguments as to why a selectionist approach to cultural evolution is inappropriate, focusing on the lack of randomness, and lack of a self-assembly code. It summarizes an alternative evolutionary approach to culture: self-other reorganization via context-driven actualization of potential.

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arXiv2019

Social Innovation and the Evolution of Creative, Sustainable Worldviews

The ideas that we forge creatively as individuals and groups build on one another in a manner that is cumulative and adaptive, forming open-ended lineages across space and time. Thus, human culture is believed to evolve. The pervasiveness of cross-domain creativity--as when a song inspires a painting--would appear indicative of discontinuities in cultural lineages. However, if what evolves through culture is our worldviews--the webs of thoughts, ideas, and attitudes that constitutes our way of seeing being in the world--then the problem of discontinuities is solved. The state of a worldview can be affected by information assimilated in one domain, and this change-of-state can be expressed in another domain. In this view, the gesture, narrative, or artifact that constitutes a specific creative act is not what is evolving; it is merely the external manifestation of the state of an evolving worldview. Like any evolutionary process, cultural evolution requires a balance between novelty, via the generation of variation, and continuity, via the preservation of variants that are adaptive. In cultural evolution, novelty is generated through creativity, and continuity is provided by social learning processes, e.g., imitation. Both the generative and imitative aspects of cultural evolution are affected by social media. We discuss the trajectory from social ideation to social innovation, focusing on the role of self-organization, renewal, and perspective-taking at the individual and social group level.

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arXiv2019

Educational Implications of the 'Self-Made Worldview' Concept

Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of a highly uncreative individual consists of a collection of items accumulated through direct experience and enculturation, the mind of a creative individual is self-organizing and self-mending; thus, experiences and items of cultural knowledge are thought through from different perspectives such that they cohere together into a loosely integrated whole. The reweaving of items in memory is elicited by perturbations: experiences that increase psychological entropy because they are inconsistent with one's web of understandings. The process of responding to one perturbation often leads to other perturbations, i.e., other inconsistencies in one's web of understandings. Creative thinking often requires the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to the ever-changing demands of the creative task. Since uncreative individuals can reap the benefits of creativity by imitating creators, using their inventions, or purchasing their artworks, it is not necessary that everyone be creative. Agent based computer models of cultural evolution suggest that society functions best with a mixture of creative and uncreative individuals. The ideal ratio of creativity to imitation increases in times of change, such as we are experiencing now. Therefore it is important to educate the next generation in ways that foster creativity. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how educational systems can cultivate creativity.

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arXiv2019

The Role of Engagement, Honing, and Mindfulness in Creativity

As both our external world and inner worlds become more complex, we are faced with more novel challenges, hardships, and duress. Creative thinking is needed to provide fresh perspectives and solve new problems.Because creativity can be conducive to accessing and reliving traumatic memories, emotional scars may be exacerbated by creative practices before these are transformed and released. Therefore, in preparing our youth to thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world, it could be helpful to cultivate in them an understanding of the creative process and its relationship to hardship, as well as tools and techniques for fostering not just creativity but self-awareness and mindfulness. This chapter is a review of theories of creativity through the lens of their capacity to account for the relationship between creativity and hardship, as well as the therapeutic effects of creativity. We also review theories and research on aspects of mindfulness attending to potential therapeutic effects of creativity. Drawing upon the creativity and mindfulness literatures, we sketch out what an introductory 'creativity and mindfulness' module might look like as part of an educational curriculum designed to address the unique challenges of the 21st Century.

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arXiv2019

Exploring the Psychological Basis for Transitions in the Archaeological Record

In lieu of an abstract here is the first paragraph: No other species remotely approaches the human capacity for the cultural evolution of novelty that is accumulative, adaptive, and open-ended (i.e., with no a priori limit on the size or scope of possibilities). By culture we mean extrasomatic adaptations--including behavior and technology--that are socially rather than sexually transmitted. This chapter synthesizes research from anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and agent-based modeling into a speculative yet coherent account of two fundamental cognitive transitions underlying human cultural evolution that is consistent with contemporary psychology. While the chapter overlaps with a more technical paper on this topic (Gabora & Smith 2018), it incorporates new research and elaborates a genetic component to our overall argument. The ideas in this chapter grew out of a non-Darwinian framework for cultural evolution, referred to as the Self-other Reorganization (SOR) theory of cultural evolution (Gabora, 2013, in press; Smith, 2013), which was inspired by research on the origin and earliest stage in the evolution of life (Cornish-Bowden & Cárdenas 2017; Goldenfeld, Biancalani, & Jafarpour, 2017, Vetsigian, Woese, & Goldenfeld 2006; Woese, 2002). SOR bridges psychological research on fundamental aspects of our human nature such as creativity and our proclivity to reflect on ideas from different perspectives, with the literature on evolutionary approaches to cultural evolution that aspire to synthesize the behavioral sciences much as has been done for the biological scientists. The current chapter is complementary to this effort, but less abstract; it attempts to ground the theory of cultural evolution in terms of cognitive transitions as suggested by archaeological evidence.

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arXiv2019

Informing Artificial Intelligence Generative Techniques using Cognitive Theories of Human Creativity

The common view that our creativity is what makes us uniquely human suggests that incorporating research on human creativity into generative deep learning techniques might be a fruitful avenue for making their outputs more compelling and human-like. Using an original synthesis of Deep Dream-based convolutional neural networks and cognitive based computational art rendering systems, we show how honing theory, intrinsic motivation, and the notion of a 'seed incident' can be implemented computationally, and demonstrate their impact on the resulting generative art. Conversely, we discuss how explorations in deep learn-ing convolutional neural net generative systems can inform our understanding of human creativity. We conclude with ideas for further cross-fertilization between AI based computational creativity and psychology of creativity.

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arXiv2019

The Evolution of Intelligence

How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural world, the raw materials for which may have been hauled up from the bowels of the earth? How did we come to be so intelligent? Research at the interface of psychology, biology, anthropology, archaeology, and cognitive science is culminating in an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how human intelligence evolved. Studies of the brains of living humans and great apes and the intellectual abilities they support are enabling us to assess what is unique about human intelligence and what we share with our primate relatives. Examining the habitats and skeletons of our ancestors gives cues as to environmental, social, and anatomical factors that both constrain and enable the evolution of human intelligence. Relics of the past also have much to tell us about the thoughts, beliefs, and abilities of the individuals who invented and used them.

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arXiv2019

The Fate of Evolutionary Archaeology: Survival or Extinction?

It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is retained. In evolutionary archaeology, (1) the population is said to consist of artifacts, yet (2) artifacts are said to be phenotypic. Neither (1) nor (2) is necessarily problematic in and of itself, but the two are inconsistent, as the first pertains to cultural change whereas the second to the biological evolution of humans. A first step to avoiding this problem is to recognize that there is a need for a theory of change specific to human culture. Referring to ongoing work using a related approach to cultural change, it is suggested that the inconsistencies in evolutionary archaeology, though problematic, are not insurmountable.

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