Linden J. Ball

Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau

The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Cognition is an authoritative reference work that offers a well-balanced overview of current scholarship across the full breadth of the rapidly expanding field of creative cognition. It contains 43 chapters written by world-leading researchers, covering foundational issues and concepts as well as state-of-the-art research developments. The handbook draws extensively on contemporary work exploring the cognitive representations and processes associated with creativity, whether studied in the laboratory or as it arises in real-world practice in domains such as education, art, science, entrepreneurship, design, and technological innovation. Chapters also examine the sociocognitive and cultural aspects of creativity in teams and organisations, while additionally capturing the latest research on the cognitive neuroscience of creativity. Providing a compelling synopsis of emerging trends and debates in the field of creative cognition and positioning these in relation to established findings and theories, this text provides a clear sense of the way in which new research is challenging traditional viewpoints. It is an essential reading for researchers in the field of creative cognition as well as advanced students wishing to learn more about the latest developments in this important and rapidly growing area of enquiry.

The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Cognition

This unique book explores how the conceptual framework of science and technology studies can be applied to creativity and problem-solving research, drawing from and building on the work of Bruno Latour. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book outlines new research practices to capture the origin of ideas. Latour enjoins researchers to adopt a resolutely ethnographic methodology to trace the process by which a creative product, be it a technological innovation or a work of art, is constructed, or instaured. Creativity is explained in terms of the microprocesses that guide and constrain the development of a new idea. These microprocesses operate on and are triggered by material objects, be they maquettes, models, drafts or data representations. The resulting perspective is systemic, casting creativity as emerging from the interaction among heterogenous elements and actants. The book provides critical reflections on problem-solving research and stresses the importance of William James’s radical empiricism and the primary role of experience. The book redefines the concept of insight as an outcome rather than the cause of a new idea. The book uses the work of Latour to cast a new light on the field of creative cognition and will be an essential read for researchers and students of creativity and cognition. It will also be relevant for anyone interested in understanding the origin of creativity, ideas and thoughts.

Bruno Latour for Creativity Researchers

Systemic Creative Cognition

Stephen J Cowley

Cognition Beyond the Brain challenges neurocentrism by advocating a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking. The systemic view steers between extended functionalism and enactivism by stressing how living beings connect bodies, technologies, language and culture. Since human thinking depends on a cultural ecology, people connect biologically-based powers with extended systems and, by so doing, they constitute cognitive systems that reach across the skin. Biological interpretation exploits extended functional systems. Illustrating distributed cognition, one set of chapters focus on computer mediated trust, work at a construction site, judgement aggregation and crime scene investigation. Turning to how bodies manufacture skills, the remaining chapters focus on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination. The feeling of doing is crucial to solving maths problems, learning about X rays, finding an invoice number, or launching a warhead in a film. People both participate in extended systems and exert individual responsibility. Brains manufacture a now to which selves are anchored: people can act automatically or, at times, vary habits and choose to author actions. In ontogenesis, a systemic view permits rationality to be seen as gaining mastery over world-side resources. Much evidence and argument thus speaks for reconnecting the study of computation, interactivity and human artifice. Taken together, this can drive a networks revolution that gives due cognitive importance to the perceivable world that lies beyond the brain. Cognition Beyond the Brain is a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners and graduate students within the fields of Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau

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