Thinking in Opposites to improve Creativity (TOC): A challenging hypothesis for Cognitive Sciences and AI (UM_TIOTIC)

Affiliated Research areas

• Attention, perception, action, consciousness

Scientific Areas

• SH4_7 Reasoning, decision-making; intelligence

Keywords

• Creativity
• Cognitive
• Sciences
• Artificial
• Intelligence
• Thinking
• Opposites
• hypothesis
• AI

Summary

In cognitive science, there is still much to be understood about the nature and mechanisms of human creative thinking, and it is a great challenge for AI as well. How can AI learn what is new, innovative and creative according to human parameters? On the one hand, it is necessary to help machines learn the patterns of human creative thinking. On the other, humans could benefit from machines not being fully aligned with them, as AI could reveal “out-of-the-box” solutions to typical human thinking. The project aims to implement a new series of studies to test the hypothesis that being stimulated to “Think in Opposites” (TOC) is a simple but powerful way to stimulate creativity in human performance and AI models. Participants' creative reasoning will be analyzed through behavioral and AI methods to investigate the three classical parameters of creativity (originality, flexibility, and fluency) and conduct research both in the laboratory and “in the field.”