Explorations of creative visual synthesis in mental imagery

Abstract

The mental synthesis of visual patterns has been previously studied by instructing subjects to imagine assembling the component parts in specific ways. We report two experiments that show that subjects can often discover recognizable patterns in imagery when the component parts are randomly chosen and are provided without instructions for how they might be assembled. On each trial, the subjects were given a set of three parts, consisting of geometric forms, lines, or alphanumeric characters, and were instructed to close their eyes and imagine combining the parts to make some type of recognizable pattern. They were successful in doing so on about 40 % of the trials. Many of these mentally synthesized patterns were strikingly creative, and few of them could be predicted, either by the experimenter or by the subjects themselves, simply by knowing what the parts were. On the contrary, most of the subjects reported that they had performed the task by imagining various combinations of the parts until a recognizable pattern "emerged." These findings show that visual discoveries in imagery can be reliably induced under appropriate laboratory conditions.

Mental and perceptual feedback in the development of creative flow

“…They suggested that MI lacks the same kind of information or is not associated with the same processes as perceptual imaging and therefore does not allow new interpretations to be formed from the same structural pattern. Verstijnen et al (1998a/b) showed that although MI was sufficient for creative combinations, sketching increased more complex restructuring abilities, resulting in more creative constructions in an experimental analogue of the creative process, the creative mental synthesis task (Finke & Slayton, 1988).…”

“…Participants performed Finke and Slayton's (1988) creative mental synthesis task (CMST) as an analogue of the visual creative process, either with or without access to sketching, to explore the effects of visual feedback on creative flow. To examine how this interacted with increasing cognitive load, participants also carried out either the traditional three-shape-set task (Finke & Slayton, 1988) or an expanded version with five shapes (Barquero & Logie, 1999). Secondary measures of affect change (another measure of subjective experience linked to flow and creating: Akbari Chermahini & Hommel, 2012;Cseh et al, 2015), performance, sense of task difficulty, idea-execution congruence, and MI vividness were also explored.…”

“…Participants completed several pre-and post-task questionnaires and carried out a modified version of Finke & Slayton's (1988) CMST (Cseh et al, 2015). The CMST is a paper-and-pen task that involves participants mentally combining simple sets of Slayton procedure (where sets were presented verbally), workbooks were used here to give uninterrupted concentration time to allow flow to develop.…”

“…Sets were semi-randomly generated (see Finke & Slayton, 1988 The PANAS scale was then repeated, to measure post-task affect and to calculate change compared to pre-task affect. Lastly, a post-task questionnaire was given asking participants to rate their own overall creativity on the task and to rate how difficult they found the task (both on 1-5, not at all/slightly-extremely scale).…”

Evaluation of a method and a computer tool for generating concept designs

“…We also relied on the work of Finke (Finke and Slayton 1988, Finke 1990, Finke et al 1992, who had used chi-square tests to confirm statistical significance of the results of his experiments (e.g. experiments on pre-inventive object forms).…”