ABSTRACT
The Creative Cognition Approach assumes that everyone has the ability to be creative, and that creativity involves applying normal cognitive processes to normal knowledge structures and occurs during problem-solving. Creative imagery is often used during creative problem-solving. Re-representing the problem as an image frees individuals from the constraints of the task, enabling insight. Mental set and design fixation can result from viewing flawed examples prior to generating ideas. This can be avoided by not viewing examples, or by viewing examples with unusual features or correlations between features. Conceptual expansion involves basing new ideas on existing knowledge. Although ideas based on specific instances of a category may be practical, more creative solutions result from thinking abstractly rather than retrieving specific examples from memory. Combining existing ideas or concepts is a useful way to generate new ideas. It is possible to increase the creativity of such combinations by combining dissimilar ideas/concepts, but it does make it more difficult to generate a workable combination.
