ABSTRACT
One aspect of expertise, in chess, in diagrammatic reasoning, in design, and in other domains, is inferring conceptual ideas from perception. In design, this process is associated with creativity. We propose that underlying this skill is a process we call constructive perception, the deliberate adoption of perceptual strategies in the service of cognition. In the case of enabling new ideas in design, this seems to be a coordination of two processes: reorganizing perception and associating ideas. The present research presents evidence for the two components underlying constructive perception. Generating new interpretations of ambiguous sketches was correlated independently with a perceptual ability, reorganizing parts of figures, and with a conceptual ability, associative fluency.
