Alternative Object Use in Adults and Children: Embodied Cognitive Bases of Creativity

in Frontiers in Psychology (2022)

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action ... [more ▼]

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action strategies do not work. On a cultural level, the exploitation of existing cultural means and norms for the deliberate production of novel and valuable artifacts is a basis for cultural and technological development and extension of human action possibilities across various domains. It is less clear, however, how creativity develops and how exactly one arrives at generating new action possibilities and producing multiple alternative action strategies using familiar objects. In this theoretical paper, we first consider existing accounts of the creative process in the Alternative Uses Task and then present an alternative interpretation, drawing on sociocultural views and an embodied cognition approach. We explore similarities between the psychological processes underlying the generation of new uses in the Alternative Uses Task and children’s pretend play. We discuss possible cognitive mechanisms and speculate how the generation of new action possibilities for common objects in pretend play can be related to adults’ ability to generate new action strategies associated with object use. Implications for creativity development in humans and embodied artificial agents are discussed. [less ▲]

From social robots to creative humans and back

in Confalonieri, Roberto; Kutz, Oliver; Veale, Tony (Eds.) et al Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Computational Creativity (2022, July)

The research on physically and socially situated artificial agents could complement and enrich computational models of creativity. This paper discusses six perspective lines of inquiry at the intersection ... [more ▼]

The research on physically and socially situated artificial agents could complement and enrich computational models of creativity. This paper discusses six perspective lines of inquiry at the intersection of creativity and social robotics. It provides a description of ways in which the field of social robotics may influence (and be influenced by) creativity research in psychology and speculates how human-machine co-creation will affect the notions of both human and artificial creativity. By discussing potential research areas, the authors hope to outline an agenda for future collaboration between creativity scholars in psychology, social robotics, and computer science. [less ▲]

Creativity in Humans, Robots, Humbots

in Creativity: Theories – Research – Applications (2021), 8(1),

Educational Robotics and Robot Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (2021)

There is a growing literature concerning robotics and creativity. Although some authors claim that robotics in classrooms may be a promising new tool to address the creativity crisis in school, we often ... [more ▼]

There is a growing literature concerning robotics and creativity. Although some authors claim that robotics in classrooms may be a promising new tool to address the creativity crisis in school, we often face a lack of theoretical development of the concept of creativity and the mechanisms involved. In this article, we will first provide an overview of existing research using educational robotics to foster creativity. We show that in this line of work the exact mechanisms promoted by robotics activities are rarely discussed. We use a confluence model of creativity to account for the positive effect of designing and coding robots on students' creative output. We focus on the cognitive components of the process of constructing and programming robots within the context of existing models of creative cognition. We address as well the question of the role of meta-reasoning and emergent strategies in the creative process. Then, in the second part of the article, we discuss how the notion of creativity applies to robots themselves in terms of the creative processes that can be embodied in these artificial agents. Ultimately, we argue that considering how robots and humans deal with novelty and solve open-ended tasks could help us to understand better some aspects of the essence of creativity. [less ▲]