Microserendipity in the Creative Process

Ross, Wendy; Vallée-Tourangeau, Frédéric

doi:10.1002/jocb.478

Cited by 29 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…A first order problem solving procedure opens the field of research by problematizing agency and instrumentality. It admits a broader class of external events that contribute to the changes in the objects, including microprocesses of a serendipitous nature (Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2020). These events do not undermine a 'psychological' account of creativity as some fear (see Chuderski et al, 2020), they expand it, and in the process align it more closely with the practices of artists and scientists (Glăveanu et al, 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insight in the Kinenoetic Field

Vallée-Tourangeau¹

2022

Preprint

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Insight problems offer an interesting tool to observe how new ideas are developed to solve simple but vexing problems. Research typically proceeds with so-called second order procedures where participants are prevented from interacting with the world, forcing them to find a solution through mental processes alone. In contrast, when participants can interact with the environment they think with and through the world by building a physical model of the solution. Properly instrumentalized, such a first order procedure enables the granular tracing of the changes to the model of the solution. These changes reflect the co-constitutive coupling of thoughts and object, or object-thought mutualities. These mutualities are recovered with the mapping of the kinenoetic field, a term coined to capture the emergence of new ideas through the spatio-temporal changes to a physical object, namely the dynamic evolution of the model of the solution. We contrast the explanatory promises and challenges that arise from a programme of research based on second order problem solving with those from a programme that explores first order thinking.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insight in the Kinenoetic Field

Vallée-Tourangeau¹

2022

Preprint

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“…In contrast, an 'enclosure' that is constructed out of pipe cleaners can easily be picked up and moved around. By physically moving the zebra figurines and the pipe cleaner enclosures, participants are more likely to serendipitously stumble upon a nonarithmetic solution (Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2020).…”

Section: The 17 Animals Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception and problem solving

Baggs¹,

Steffensen²

2023

Places, Sociality, and Ecological Psychology

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Gibsonian psychology sometimes comes in for criticism along the following lines (e.g., Clark, 1998, 149 ff.).First, the critic grants that, yes, Gibson's ecological approach may provide a useful description of how perception works, at least for some limited set of animals and situations. But the critic then asserts that Gibson's approach simply cannot scale up to provide an account of how humans perform genuinely cognitively demanding tasks.Gibsonian psychology, we are told, is a non-starter when it comes to explaining, say, how we are able to remember the recipe for a lemon drizzle cake, or how we can plan what we will be doing at this time next Tuesday.Harry Heft has done more than most to defend Gibson's approach from such criticisms. Much of Heft's work has been focused on situating Gibson's perceptual program within the broader theoretical landscape of psychology.Heft's 2001 book, Ecological Psychology in Context, encompasses two projects. The first project is historical.In the first half of the book, Heft situates Gibson's ecological approach to perception within a particular historical tradition that begins with the phenomenologically rich psychology of William James and continues through the work of James's student, E. B. Holt. Heft's second project is more programmatic. In the second part of the book, Heft aims to expand ecological psychologists' understanding of what the environment is. Gibson's work was often narrowly focused on the psychology of perception, and this led him to emphasize animals' interactions with the inanimate furniture of the world around them: the substances, surfaces, and objects. Heft wants to draw ecological psychologists' attention to the fact that the perceiving animal exists not only in a physical environment, but also in a social environment, and moreover that learning to negotiate this social environment involves, at least in humans, a long history of development.For Heft, the question of whether Gibson's perceptual program can be scaled up to encompass higher cognition is ill-posed. It is ill-posed because Gibson's program was not intended to provide a new account of cognition, only a new account of perception. To demand that Gibson's program be scaled up to encompass higher cognition is to imply that Gibsonians can only ever think of higher cognition as an outgrowth of the kinds of perceptual processes that Gibson himself was interested in. Cognition, on this framing, would be a kind of perception-plus. This is a framing that Gibsonians should reject. It would be overly restrictive to assert that all problems in psychology are problems of perception.

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“…In convergent dynamics, the partners smoothly pick up on each other, including, of course, exploiting serendipitous starting points provided by the partner (cf. Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2021b). Convergent cocreation exhibits biomechanical continuity or thematic coherence between the partners.…”

Section: Emergent Creativity: Nonlinear Interaction Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The spectrum of distributed creativity: Tango dancing and its generative modalities.

Kimmel¹,

Alphen²

2022

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

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As scholars have recently emphasized, creativity is not restricted to the individual mind; it can happen in and through interaction. To evaluate the legitimacy of claims about “distributed creativity,” we propose a compare-and-contrast approach to Argentine tango. Tango is an improvisational leader–follower dance of a formally constrained kind, yet one that also allows for a range of modes of being creative together in real-time interaction. Six dance couples were filmed while improvising and subsequently interviewed. Based on video vignettes of a few seconds duration, we microgenetically reconstructed the embodied “give-and-take” between partners, from which creative trajectories emerge. The spectrum of cocreative modalities ranges from creativity realized in interaction, but bearing some mark of the individual, to creativity, in which the interaction itself becomes an operative mechanism. Cocreation can happen in forms guided by a single person, yet jointly executed (“leader creativity”), in subordinate spaces that provide for some individual creative autonomy within a collective dynamic, in parallel or additive creative interaction forms, but also in genuinely multiplicative forms in which self-organizing interaction dynamics become a powerful causal factor that leverages creativity. To accommodate these various modalities, we argue for a dynamic-systemic account, which looks at interdependencies between micro- and macrolevels. Our framework recognizes different degrees of creative autonomy within interaction; it hereby avoids a dichotomy between individualistic accounts and interactionism with a purely collective-level focus.

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Microserendipity in the Creative Process

Cited by 29 publications

References 63 publications

Insight in the Kinenoetic Field

Insight in the Kinenoetic Field

Perception and problem solving

The spectrum of distributed creativity: Tango dancing and its generative modalities.

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