How Creative Ideas Take Shape

Abstract

According to the honing theory of creativity, creative thought works not on individually considered, discrete, predefined representations but on a contextually-elicited amalgam of items which exist in a state of potentiality and may not be readily separable. This leads to the prediction that analogy making proceeds not by mapping correspondences from candidate sources to target, as predicted by the structure mapping theory of analogy, but by weeding out non-correspondences, thereby whittling away at potentiality. Participants were given an analogy problem, interrupted before they had time to solve it, and asked to write down what they had by way of a solution. Na\"ive judges categorized responses as significantly more supportive of the predictions of honing theory than those of structure mapping.