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Creative Cognition: Conceptual Blending and Expansion in a Generative Exemplar Task

Creativity is a multifaceted and complex human trait that allows one to generate and explore unlimited novel ideas and artifacts. One method to study creativity is to use a creative cognition approach (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Smith, Ward, Finke, 1995; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999), which examines the cognitive processes and structures that lead to the generation of creative ideas. Participants in this study were asked to draw and describe a creature on a distant planet, similar to a prompt used by Ward (1991). Results suggest that the participants relied on what has been termed, structured imagination (Ward, 1994, 1995), or a repertoire of existing knowledge that constrains the production of imaginative ideas. Five responses were then selected for deeper analysis to show how two cognitive processes, conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) and conceptual expansion, are used to blend and expand known concepts in order to produce a novel idea. This paper discusses implications this research has for theories of creativity and its real world applications, as well as its importance for educational objectives.