Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The creative process involves several cognitive processes,such as working memory, controlled attention and taskswitching. One other process is cognitive search oversemantic memory. These search processes can be controlled(e.g., problem solving guided by a heuristic), or uncontrolled(e.g., mind wandering). However, the nature of this search inrelation to creativity has rarely been examined from a formalperspective. To do this, we use a random walk model tosimulate uncontrolled cognitive search over semanticnetworks of low and high creative individuals with an equalnumber of nodes and edges. We show that a random walkover the semantic network of high creative individuals “finds”more unique words and moves further through the networkfor a given number of steps. Our findings are consistent withthe associative theory of creativity, which posits that thestructure of semantic memory facilitates search processes tofind creative solutions.