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 mechanismsrequired to produce creative problem-solving and insight. Such mechanisms areidentified in an essentialized set of human abilities: making visuospatial inferences,creativelysolvingproblemsinvolvingobjectaffordances,usingexperiencewithpre-viously solved problems to find solutions for new problems, generating new con-cepts out of old ones. Each such cognitive ability is selected to suggests a princi-ple necessary for the harder feat of engineering insight. The features such abilitiespresuppose in a cognitive system are addressed. A core set of mechanisms able tosupport such features is proposed. A unified system framework in line with cogni-tive research is suggested, in which the knowledge-encoding supports the variety of such processes efficiently.