ABSTRACT
To understand acts of creation, it is useful to contrast creative cognition with routine cognition. The essence of routine cognition is the extrapolation of past experience to new situations. This inductive approach works well in most situations, but it is unable to go beyond past experience. A theory of creative cognition in general, and insight problem solving in particular, should specify the additional, noninductive processes that enable acts of creation, as well as the conditions that trigger those processes. The semantic processing hypothesis claims that creativity requires knowledge retrieval to be guided by semantic relevance instead of prior experience. The volatility detection hypothesis claims that semantic processing is triggered when a person detects second-order change in the environment. These hypotheses imply several novel types of study of creativity and insight.
