The creative process in(between) humans and machines

Arguably, embodiment is the most neglected aspect of cognitive psychology and creativity research. Whereas most existing theoretical frameworks are inspired by or implicitly imply “cognition as a computer” metaphor, depicting creative thought as a disembodied idea generation and processing of amodal symbols, this thesis proposes that “cognition as a robot” may be a better metaphor to understand how creative cognition operates .
In this thesis, I compare and investigate human creative cognition in relation to embodied artificial agents that has to learn to navigate and act in complex and changing material and social environments from a set of multimodal streams (e.g., vision, haptic). Instead of relying on divergent thinking or associative accounts of creativity, I attempt to elaborate an embodied and action-oriented vision of creativity grounded in the 4E cognition paradigm.
Situated at the intersection of the psychology of creativity, technology, and embodied cognitive science, the thesis attempts to synthesize disparate lines of work and look at a complex problem of human creativity through interdisciplinary lenses. In this perspective, the study of creativity is no longer a prerogative of social scientists but a collective and synergistic endeavor of psychologists, engineers, designers, and computer scientists.