Vincent R. Brown

Modeling Cognitive Interactions During Group Brainstorming

Despite laboratory evidence that group brainstormers produce fewer ideas than individual brainstormers, brainstorming groups remain popular in business and industry. Here the authors present a model of the cognitive factors involved in group idea generation. Simulations suggest that group interaction should be beneficial when one group member primes another into thinking of ideas they would not have considered alone, at least not in the context of the task at hand. Many concepts relevant to group cognition can be defined within the model framework (stochastic transition matrices) including fluency, flexibility, category accessibility, convergent/divergent thinking, attention to partners, and the relationship between the knowledge structures of the brainstorming participants. Attention plays a crucial role in the model, linking together individuals in a brainstorming group. Simulations also suggest that convergent group behavior may be the result ofcognitivefactors in addition to the socialfactors outlined by a number of researchers.

Making Group Brainstorming More Effective: Recommendations From an Associative Memory Perspective

Much literature on group brainstorming has found it to be less effective than individual brainstorming. However, a cognitive perspective suggests that group brainstorming could be an effective technique for generating creative ideas. Computer simulations of an associative memory model of idea generation in groups suggest that groups have the potential to generate ideas that individuals brainstorming alone are less likely to generate. Exchanging ideas by means of writing or computers, alternating solitary and group brainstorming, and using heterogeneous groups appear to be useful approaches for enhancing group brainstorming.

Effects of task instructions and brief breaks on brainstorming.

Experiment 1 examined the effects of additional brainstorming rules for groups and looked at whether the presence of a facilitator who actively enforced the rules of brainstorming was beneficial. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether the additional rules and brief breaks were beneficial to individual brainwriters and electronic brainstormers working alone. Clear benefits of the additional rules were found under a variety of conditions. The presence of a facilitator to enforce the rules enhanced the efficiency of idea generation (number of words used to express ideas) but not the number of ideas generated. There appears to be a small benefit to taking breaks in brainwriting sessions, but the benefit of breaks is reduced or eliminated in electronic brainstorming sessions.

2009 Special Issue: Neural dynamics of idea generation and the effects of priming

Idea generation is a fundamental attribute of the human mind, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unclear. In this paper, we present a dynamic connectionist model for the generation of ideas within a brainstorming context. The key hypothesis underlying the model is that ideas emerge naturally from itinerant attractor dynamics in a multi-level, modular semantic space, and the potential surface underlying this dynamics is itself shaped dynamically by task context, ongoing evaluative feedback, inhibitory modulation, and short-term synaptic modification. While abstract, the model attempts to capture the interplay between semantic representations, working memory, attentional selection, reinforcement signals, and modulation. We show that, once trained on a set of contexts and ideas, the system can rapidly recall stored ideas in familiar contexts, and can generate novel ideas by efficient, multi-level dynamical search in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts. We also use a simplified continuous-time instantiation of the model to explore the effect of priming on idea generation. In particular, we consider how priming low-accessible categories in a connectionist semantic network can lead to the generation of novel ideas. The mapping of the model onto various regions and modulatory processes in the brain is also discussed briefly.

Modeling Ideational Creativity in Groups: Connecting Cognitive, Neural, and Computational Approaches

Many creative activities take place in a group context, whether in short-term meetings, work teams, or by means of electronic interaction. The group creative process necessarily involves the exchange of ideas or information. Recent models of group creativity have focused on the cognitive underpinnings of this type of group creative process, primarily based on the group brainstorming literature. The authors describe an elaborated computational version of their cognitive model of group creativity and related computational models, and highlight some plausible neural bases for various involved processes. The major findings and theoretical perspectives in this literature are summarized and some potentially fruitful empirical and theoretical directions are highlighted. It is hoped that this comprehensive treatment can be a basis for integrating the present literature and providing useful predictions for further research on this topic.

Effects of relevant and irrelevant primes on idea generation: A computational model

Brainstorming is the process of generating ideas in a specific task or problem context.We have previously presented a connectionist framework to study the dynamics of idea generation in individuals. In this paper, we develop this model further, and apply it to studying qualitatively the effects of priming on the process of ideation. Motivated by experimental data from a previous study, we explore the differential effects of relevant and irrelevant primes on productivity of idea generation in specific problem/task contexts. Simulations using our model suggest that even irrelevant primes can provide a modest productivity boost in contexts that are familiar or are similar to familiar contexts, but no benefit when the context is unfamiliar. We propose possible explanations for these results and make predictions for future experiments.

A conceptual neural model of idea generation

Understanding the neural mechanisms of the idea generation process has implications for research in brainstorming, creativity and innovation. In this paper we present a conceptual neural model for generating ideas. The model extends the associative memory model of Brown et al. (1998) by explicitly representing categories as networks of concepts and ideas as conceptual combinations. Simulation results are compared with experimental results on effects of priming on low, versus high accessibility categories.

Modularity and Self-Organized Functional Architectures in the Brain

It is generally believed that cognition involves the self-organization of coherent dy- namic functional networks across several brain regions in response to incoming stimulus and internal modulation. These context-dependent networks arise continually from the spatiotemporally multi-scale structural substrate of the brain configured by evolution, development and previous experience, persisting for 100–200 ms and generating re- sponses such as imagery, recall and motor action. In the current paper, we show that a system of interacting modular attractor networks can use a selective mechanism for assembling functional networks from the modular substrate. We use the approach to develop a model of idea-generation in the brain. Ideas are modeled as combinations of concepts organized in a recurrent network that reflects previous associations between them. The dynamics of this network, resulting in the transient co-activation of concept groups, is seen as a search through the space of ideas, and attractor dynamics is used to “shape” this search. The process is required to encompass both rapid retrieval of old ideas in familiar contexts and efficient search for novel ones in unfamiliar situations (or during brainstorming). The inclusion of an adaptive modulatory mechanism allows the network to balance the competing requirements of exploiting previous learning and exploring new possibilities as needed in different contexts.

The activation-selection model of meaning: Explaining why the son comes out after the sun

The activation-selection model (ASM) of determining the meaning of an ambiguous word is unique in that it is able to account for the long-term effects of meaning selection without an explicit mechanism for suppressing the representation of the nonselected meaning. The model assumes that a meaning is selected when a threshold number of attributes associated with that particular meaning are activated. When a meaning is selected, the ASM assumes that the weights of the attributes that are associated with the chosen meaning are increased. This two-phase process (transient activation followed by long-term weight changes) provides a mechanism by which meaning selection at one time can affect meaning selection at a much later time. The ASM can explain the results of the presently reported experiments, in which the meaning selected for a homophone presented in an unbiased context is affected by multiple previous presentations of the homophone in different contexts. In particular, although participants who are initially oriented toward the secondary meaning of a homophone show an increased proportion of dominant responses when next primed by the dominant meaning of the homophone, the proportion of dominant responses decreases to below baseline levels when the homophone is later presented in a neutral context, indicating the lasting influence of the initial secondary meaning context.

A new look at recognition in the Brown-Peterson distractor paradigm: toward the application of new methodology to unsolved problems of recognition memory.

Data from a recognition version of the classic Brown-Peterson short-term memory paradigm was analyzed using a modified version of the conjoint recognition model (Brainerd, Reyna, & Mojardin, 1999), which assumes that recognition is based on either a verbatim comparison of the recognition probe and the target item or a gist comparison of the items. Separate groups of participants were instructed to judge whether the recognition probe was an item from the current trial (exclusion condition), a previous trial (prior-only condition), or either the current or the previous trial (inclusion condition). The concept of gist is commonly thought of as meaning based. Our interpretation of the results suggests that the concept of gist need also emphasize similarity of environmental context. In addition, the results show that priming the recognition probe affects a participant’s decision bias but does not enhance or impair the memory traces on which the recognition judgments are based. An additional analysis using Batchelder and Riefer’s (1990) source-monitoring model supports the observation that priming affects only decision bias.