Divergent Thinking in a Neurodynamical Model of Ideation

Divergent thinking refers to a style of thinking that ranges across a broad range of concepts, and is considered to be a core enabler of creativity. Thinking is often modeled as a process of conceptual combination, and creative ideas are seen as those using unconventional combinations of concepts. Since conceptual combination is fundamentally an associative process, it has been proposed that creative thinking reflects stronger than expected associations between normally remote associates in the mind of the thinker. We recently proposed a neurodynamical model called Itinerant Dynamics with Emergent Attractors ( IDEA) to explore the process by which ideas can emerge in an associative memory system through conceptual combination. In this paper we study how the functional dynamics of this model changes when its associative weights are changed to make remote associations stronger. We apply the model to data from four sets of papers from previous IJCNN meetings. In addition to identifying the differences in the dynamics due to changes in the association pattern, we consider whether divergent thinking can potentially predict future ideas or reconstruct past ideas.