Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Creative conceptual change involves (a) the construction of new concepts and of coherent belief systems, or theories, relating these concepts, and (b) the modification and extrapolation of existing concepts and theories in novel situations. I discuss these and other types of conceptual change, and present computational models of constructive and extrapolative processes in creative conceptual change. The models have been implemented as computer programs in two very different task domains, autonomous robotic navigation and fictional story understanding.