Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to the honing theory of creativity, the iterativeprocess culminating in a creative work is made possible by theself-organizing nature of a conceptual network, or worldview,and its innate holistic tendency to minimize inconsistency. Assuch, the creative process is not limited to the problem domain,and influences on creativity from domains other than that of thefinal product are predicted to be widespread. We conducted astudy in which participants with varying levels of creativeexperience listed their creative outputs, as well as influences(sources of inspiration) on these outputs. Of the 758 creativeinfluences, 13% were within-domain narrow, 13% within-domain broad, 67% cross-domain, and 6% unclear. Thesefindings support the hypothesis that to trace the inspirationalsources or ‘conceptual parents’ of a creative output, and thustrack its cultural lineage, one must look beyond the problemdomain to the creators’ self-organizing, inconsistency-minimizing worldview at large.