Work in progress
Attention and Memory as Mechanisms for Creative Insight
Revise and Resubmit at Synthese
Why are some people more creative than others? This paper provides a more adequate answer than existing accounts in the current literature by identifying two underlying mechanisms. First, I argue that the formation of memory gists increases the connectivity of memory structure by extracting general patterns or schemas shared by disparate memory contents. This enables highly creative individuals to rapidly retrieve a wide variety of memory contents. Second, I introduce the notion of internal diffuse attention to explain how highly creative people retrieve memory gists and generate creative thoughts. Drawing on a parallel between internal and external attention, I argue that just as we can attend diffusely to global objects and properties in visual perception, we can also attend diffusely to global patterns in memory generated through gist extraction. My two-factor account of creative thinking therefore highlights the extraction of gist memory and diffuse attention as the crucial mechanisms of creative thinking.
Mind Wandering as Diffuse Attention (co-authored with Azenet Lopez)
Under Review
This paper reconciles an inconsistency between the benefits of mind wandering and a prominent conception of attention in philosophy and cognitive psychology, namely, the prioritization view. Since during mind wandering we plausibly pay less attention to concurrent tasks, why does mind wandering sometimes improve rather than impair concurrent task performance? To explain this, we offer a conception of diffuse attention that generalizes from external to internal forms of attention and conceptualize mind wandering as an instance of it. Our account thereby explains the interaction between mind wandering and other tasks and calls for revisions to the prioritization view.
Epistemic Generation in Gist Memory: a Case from Creative Insight
In Progress (Draft available upon request)
In this paper, I reject the traditional view in epistemology that memory merely preserves epistemic justification from perception or reasoning, but does not generate new epistemic justification by itself (Burge 1997, Goldman 2009). I argue that the memory consolidation processes that underlie the emergence of creative insights generate new epistemic justifications that were not already present when the relevant contents were first encoded. I draw on studies that show that creative insights sometimes emerge after a night’s sleep due to the memory consolidation processes that occur during sleep (Wagner et al. 2004). I argue that memory consolidation that underlies creative thinking generates new epistemic justification by building connections between different contents and facilitating extraction of general patterns that were not accessible to subjects at the time of memory encoding.