I model the creative development of individuals working in a field. My motivation
is to contribute to the development of a formal framework to describe and predict
how individuals in a field come to generate creative ideas and insights.
In particular I am interested in how individuals' ideas are rooted in and
emerge out of conceptual structures they develop through pursuing self-defined
paths of exploration.
The model of creative development builds on the description I present in The
Nature of Creative Development (Stanford U. Press, 2006). The field is described
by a knowledge structure, modeled as a graph with a basic hierarchical structure
plus additional links.
In the model each individual forms a creative interest which is defined by a
sentence or set of elements from the knowledge structure. Individuals then
encounter a series of windows. A window contains a series of culture bags.
Culture bags include creative contributions made by others, as well as other
kinds of phenomena and experiences; specifically, each bag consists of a set of
elements from the knowledge structure, generated via a probability model.
In each window bags are ranked in terms of general interest from highest
(first) to lowest. Each individual attends to the first bag in the window
that intersects with his particular creative interest, meaning that at
least one element of the bag lies in the domain of his interest; once an
individual attends to a bag, he can attend to no further bags in that
window – thus a person attends to either 1 bag or 0 bags in each window.
When an individual attends to a bag he internalizes its elements.
Thus over a series of windows an individual builds up a conceptual
structure associated with his creative interest.
The model is designed to capture certain basic tradeoffs.
If an individual forms a very broad interest he is almost sure to attend
to a bag in every window, but he is likely to attend to one of the first
bags and thus to a bag that others may also attend to.
The result is that the conceptual structure he forms is large but less
distinctive. If his interest is very narrow he is likely to attend to
no bags in some windows, thus ends up with a smaller conceptual structure.
Hence the “optimal” creative interest, from the viewpoint of building up a
rich distinctive conceptual structure, is of intermediate breadth.
Simulation results confirm this, and show how optimal breadth varies
with the underlying model parameters.
In addition to breadth and distinctiveness, I also explore other facets
of the conceptual structures individuals build up, including the distance
between pairs of elements and the number of shortest paths between elements.
Overall, the results manifest the subtlety of the interaction between the
knowledge structure, the process of generation of culture bags, and the
process of creative development.
I am optimistic that the framework has promise as a fruitful way to study
creative development and cultural development.