Embodied Creativity: A Critical Analysis of an Underdeveloped Subject (original) (raw)
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Beyond Two Minds: Cognitive, Embodied, and Evaluative Processes in Creativity
Social Psychology Quarterly, 2019
Scholars in sociology and social psychology typically represent creativity as an imaginative and deliberate mental activity. Such a perspective has led to a view of creativity as disconnected from the body and the senses as well as from nonanalytic cognition. In this article, we demonstrate that creativity is more grounded in bodily and sensory experience and more reliant on a combination of cognitive processes than has been typically recognized. We use literature on social cognition and embodiment to build our arguments, specifically, the embodied simulation perspective and tripartite process models. We draw from data on elite chefs to show how actors rely on embodied simulations, continually switch between heu-ristic and analytical thinking, and monitor and control their cognitive processing during the creative process. We outline the implications of this study for the understanding of creativity and extant models of cognition and action more generally.
Embodied Metaphor and Creative "Acts"
Creativity is a highly sought-after skill. Prescriptive advice for inspiring creativity abounds in the form of metaphors: People are encouraged to "think outside the box," to consider a problem "on one hand, then on the other hand," and to "put two and two together" to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances in the understanding of body-mind linkages in the research on embodied cognition, we explored whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem solving. Our findings from five studies revealed that both physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors for creativity promoted convergent thinking and divergent thinking (i.e., fluency, flexibility, or originality) in problem solving. Going beyond prior research, which focused primarily on the kind of embodiment that primes preexisting knowledge, we provide the first evidence that embodiment can also activate cognitive processes that facilitate the generation of new ideas and connections.
Making imagination Even More Embodied - preprint
Synthese, 2021
This paper considers the epistemic role that embodiment plays in imagining. We focus on two aspects of embodied cognition understood in its strong sense: explicit motoric processes related to performance, and neuronal processes rooted in bodily and action processes, and describe their role in imagining. The paper argues that these two aspects of strongly embodied cognition can play distinctive and positive roles in constraining imagining, thereby complementing Amy Kind's argument for the epistemic relevance of imagination "under constraints" and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson's argument for justification by imagination.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
Modern ideas of embodiment have been influential in cognitive science for the past several decades, yet there is minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches in creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills. With creativity research in crisis due to conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues, radical embodied cognitive science (RECS) may offer a framework to move the field forward. This conceptual analysis examines the current state of creativity research from the 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition and RECS perspectives. Two streams are critiqued for their potential to further knowledge about the development of creative expertise and inform educational practices. Promising directions for future research is discussed, including ways dynamical systems approaches, such as those used in improvisational and musical creativity, might yield new insights about how people develop creative expertise and help address the "higher order thinking" criticisms of RECS.
Embodiment and Computational Creativity
ArXiv, 2021
We conjecture that creativity and the perception of creativity are, at least to some extent, shaped by embodiment. This makes embodiment highly relevant for computational creativity (CC) research, but existing research is scarce and the use of the concept highly ambiguous. We overcome this situation by means of a systematic review and a prescriptive analysis of publications at the International Conference on Computational Creativity. We adopt and extend an established typology of embodiment to resolve ambiguity through identifying and comparing different usages of the concept. We collect, contextualise and highlight opportunities and challenges in embracing embodiment in CC as a reference for research, and put forward important directions to further the embodied CC research programme.
Embodied Creative Agents: A Preliminary Social-Cognitive Framework
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
The goal of this paper is to open discussion about industrial creativity as a potential application field for Embodied Conversational Agents. We introduce the domain of creativity and especially focus on a collective creativity tool, the brainstorming: we present the related research in Psychology which has identified several key cognitive and social mechanisms that influence brainstorming process and outcome. However, some dimensions remain unexplored, such as the influence of the partners' personality or the facilitator's personality on idea generation. We propose to explore these issues, among others, using Embodied Conversational Agents. The idea seems original given that Embodied Agents were never included into brainstorming computer tools. We draw some hypotheses and a research program, and conclude on the potential benefits for the knowledge on creativity process on the one hand, and for the field of Embodied Conversational Agents on the other hand. Creativity is a high-level cognitive process which has given rise to researches in various fields such as Psychology , Engineering [6, or Human-Computer Interaction . Creativity applies to artistic work (e.g. fine arts, literature, architecture, music), educative domain (e.g. early-learning and playing activities), scientific skills (e.g. problem resolution, discoveries, epistemological breakthroughs), and industrial applications (e.g. creation of product functions, stylistic design of artifacts).
The (Artificial) Physicality of Creativity: How Embodiment Influences Perceptions of Creativity
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Creativity, 2022
The generation of artifacts through computational creativity (CC) systems is hitting the headlines with increasing frequency. Although impressive, this paper will not focus on the outcomes achieved by these systems, but rather on a specific dimension of artistic processes: embodiment. I discuss the results of a recent factorial survey study aimed at testing the influence that embodiment has on the evaluation of creativity. These findings show that the physical dimension of artificial systems interacting with human artists contributes to the perception of the interplay between artificial and human agents as a creative collaboration. I propose that a closer study of the dynamics of interaction between embodied machines, human artists, and the public can facilitate progress in both the artistic and the technology sector.
THEORETICAL AND REVIEW ARTICLES Six views of embodied cognition
There is a movement afoot in cognitive science to grant the body a central role in shaping the mind. Proponents of embodied cognition take as their theoretical starting point not a mind working on abstract problems, but a body that requires a mind to make it function. These opening lines by Clark (1998) are typical: " Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies. Biological bodies move and act in rich real-world surroundings " (p. 506). Traditionally, the various branches of cognitive science have viewed the mind as an abstract information processor , whose connections to the outside world were of little theoretical importance. Perceptual and motor systems, though reasonable objects of inquiry in their own right, were not considered relevant to understanding " central " cognitive processes. Instead, they were thought to serve merely as peripheral input and output devices. This stance was evident in the early decades of cognitive psychology, when most theories of human thinking dealt in proposi-tional forms of knowledge. During the same time period, artificial intelligence was dominated by computer models of abstract symbol processing. Philosophy of mind, too, made its contribution to this zeitgeist, most notably in Fodor's (1983) modularity hypothesis. According to Fodor, central cognition is not modular, but its connections to the world are. Perceptual and motor processing are done by informationally encapsulated plug-ins providing sharply limited forms of input and output. However, there is a radically different stance that also has roots in diverse branches of cognitive science. This stance has emphasized sensory and motor functions, as well as their importance for successful interaction with the environment. Early sources include the view of 19th century psychologists that there was no such thing as " imageless thought " (Good-win, 1999); motor theories of perception such as those suggested by William James and others (see Prinz, 1987, for a review); the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, which emphasized the emergence of cognitive abilities out of a groundwork of sensorimotor abilities; and the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, which viewed perception in terms of affordances— potential interactions with the environment. In the 1980s, linguists began exploring how abstract concepts may be based on metaphors for bodily, physical concepts (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). At the same time, within the field of artificial intelligence, behavior-based robotics began to emphasize routines for interacting with the environment rather than internal representations used for abstract thought (see, e.g., Brooks, 1986). This kind of approach has recently attained high visibility , under the banner of embodied cognition. There is a growing commitment to the idea that the mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to a physical body that interacts with the world. It is argued that we have evolved from creatures whose neural resources were devoted primarily to perceptual and motoric processing, and whose cognitive activity consisted largely of immediate, on-line interaction with the environment. Hence human cog-nition, rather than being centralized, abstract, and sharply distinct from peripheral input and output modules, may instead have deep roots in sensorimotor processing. Although this general approach is enjoying increasingly broad support, there is in fact a great deal of diversity in the claims involved and the degree of controversy they attract. If the term embodied cognition is to retain meaning-625 The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-pressured; (3) we off-load cognitive work onto the environment; (4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; (5) cognition is for action; (6) off-line cognition is body based. Of these, the first three and the fifth appear to be at least partially true, and their usefulness is best evaluated in terms of the range of their applicability. The fourth claim, I argue, is deeply problematic. The sixth claim has received the least attention in the literature on embodied cognition, but it may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims.
Creativity, Embodied and Extended
I present the basis for reconfiguring the concept of creativity using an embodied / extended model of mind, and indicate elements embedded within formal education that are in tension with this approach.
Creative processes and extended cognition in Embodied in varios Darmstadt'58
In this essay, we explore the creative and technological processes involved in the development of the performance " Embodied in various Darmstadt'58 " from the viewpoint of the extended and distributed cognition. Although the literature has discussed the telematic art from a variety of similar points of view, the project " Embodied in various Darmstadt'58 " features an unusual conFiguretion of openings and randomness, complexity and minimalism, engineering and art, which allow a distinguished approach on the relationship between technology, art and cognition. In this essay, we present guiding concepts that substantiate the theories of embodied mind and describe part of development of computational tools used in the creative process. We argue that the complexity of creative concepts involved the performance had promoted the extension of poetic elements and cognitive loads to the technological domain of the machines.