<Constructive Perception /
Cognitive Structure of Creative Processes>
Masaki Suwa, Professor
Department of Information and Intelligence
School of Information Science and Technology
Research Interest
How do people generate creative ideas and products?
What kind of cognitive processes underlie those creative endeavors?
What is the expertise, if any, for enabling creative endeavors?
What does it have to do with the kind of expertise discussed in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and social science?
How should people be trained to generate creative ideas and products?
These are some of the issues I would like to address.
One study I have been conducting for the past several years is to look into the cognitive processes of professional designers, e.g. architects, industrial designers and graphic designers, using the technique of protocol analysis. They use an external representation for thinking, typically freehand sketches, to generate novel ideas. The purpose of the study is to examine the roles of those external representations, and thereby, demystify the cognitive processes underlying creative endeavors. I have obtained the following insight empirically so far. Two cognitive processes, reconstructive perception and the generation of novel interpretations, are the vehicles driving a creative process. The former is to reconstruct ways to see the external representation being used and thereby detect unintended/hidden visuo-spatial features and relations in it. This enables so-called "mental leaps", generating novel ideas and interpretations that would otherwise not be probable to be obtained. The generation of novel interpretations, in turn, motivates drawing onto and changing the external representation and thereby provides a new viewpoint allowing for reconstructive perception again. This way, the external representations, perceptual reconstruction and conceptual generation co-develop on the fly, affecting one another. A creative process does not occur purely internally. It does not proceed in a manner planned in advance. Rather, it is generated and proceeds interactively in a way situated in the external world. A creative process is a situated act.
This insight has made me question another issue. Is perceptual reconstruction and the resulting conceptual leap an expertise for creative endeavors in general? If so, what does it have to do with the kind of expertise discussed in AI, cognitive science and social science? A set of projects I and students have just started working on is to do a longitudinal study of cognitive processes of people as they are engaged in various activities associated with creative processes and learning, such as art, design, planning, sports and so on. We are aiming at examining how the ways of perception and conception may change as people become more proficient in some skills or come to generate highly-evaluated products in a target domain.
A third set of projects I am running is an experimental trial to establish a way to foster undergraduate students toward acts of creation. In order to let students experience and carry out reconstructive perception and conceptual generation naturally in their cognition, I design and provide them with many "everyday-life kind of" activities that require the intentional operation of those two cognitive processes. I am going to evaluate whether those activities will change the way of students' cognition in terms of reconstructive perception, their way to see the world around them and the quality of the products they generate, e.g. writing, drawing, interpretations of what they see, and so on.
I received my BE, ME and PhD from
Selected Publications
Suwa, M. (2002). Constructive perception: Coordinating perception and conception toward acts of problem-finding in a creative experience. Japanese Psychological Research. (forthcoming).
Suwa, M. (2002).
Constructive perception: An expertise to use diagrams for dynamic
interactivity, Proc. of 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
(publication-based talk),
Suwa, M. and Tversky, B. (2002). External representations contribute to the dynamic construction of ideas. In M. Hegarty, B. Meyer and N. H. Narayanan (eds.) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference, Proceedings of Diagrams 2002. lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series, Springer, pp.341-343.
Suwa, M. and Tversky, B.
(2001). How do designers shift their focus of
attention in their own sketches? in M. Anderson, B.
Meyer and P. Olivier (eds.) Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning,
pp.241-254, Springer,
Suwa, M. and Tversky, B. (2001). Constructive perception in design", in J. S. Gero and M. L. Maher (eds.) Proc. of Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design V, Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, pp.227-239.
Suwa, M., Tversky, B., Gero, J. and Purcell, T. (2001). Seeing into sketches: regrouping parts encourages new interpretations", in J. S. Gero, B. Tversky, and T. Purcell (eds.) Proc. of Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design II, Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, Australia, pp. 207-220.
Suwa, M., Tversky, B., Gero, J. and Purcell, T. (2001). Regrouping parts of an external representation as
a source of insight. Proc. of the 3rd International Conference on
Cognitive Science, Press of USTC,
Suwa, M., Gero, J. and Purcell, T. (2000) Unexpected discoveries and S-invention of design requirements: Important vehicles for a design process. Design Studies, 21(6), pp.539-567.
Suwa，M. (1999). Visual displays as stimuli to cognitive processes，Journal of the Visualization Society of Japan, 19(72), pp.13-18. (in Japanese)
Suwa, M., Purcell, T. and Gero, J. (1998). Macroscopic analysis of design processes based on a scheme for coding designers' cognitive actions. Design Studies, 19(4), pp.455-483.
Suwa, M., Gero, J. and Purcell, T. (1998). Analysis of cognitive processes of a designer as the foundation for support tools. in J. S. Gero and F. Sudweeks (eds), Proc. of Artificial Intelligence in Design '98, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 229-247.
Suwa, M., Gero, J. and
Purcell, T. (1998). The roles
of sketches in early conceptual design processes. Proceedings
of 20th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society,
Suwa, M. and Tversky, B. (1997). What do architects and students perceive in their design sketches? A protocol analysis. Design Studies, 18(4), pp.385-403.
Suwa, M. and Tversky, B.
(1996). What architects see in their sketches:
Implications for design tools. CHI'96
Conference Companion, ACM Press,
Nakashima, H., Arima, J., Sato, S., Suwa, M, Hasida, K. and Asada, M. (1996). Future AI Research Direction. Journal of Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 11(5), pp.713-724. (in Japanese).
Suwa, M. and Motoda, H. (1995). Operator schemata acquisition based on recognition propagation rule. Cognitive Studies: the Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society. 2(4), pp.39-55.
Narayanan, N. H., Suwa, M. and Motoda, H. (1995). Diagram-based problem-solving: The case of an impossible problem,
Proc. of 17th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society,
Narayanan, N. H., Suwa, M. and Motoda, H. (1994). How things appear to work: Predicting behaviors from device diagrams, Proc. of AAAI-94, pp.1161-1167.
Narayanan, N. H., Suwa, M. and Motoda, H. (1994). A study of diagrammatic reasoning from verbal and gestural data, Proc. of 16th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Atlanta, GA, pp.652-657
Suwa, M. and Motoda, H.
(1994). PCLEARN: A model for acquiring
perceptual chunks. Proc. of 16th Annual Meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society,
Suwa, M. and Motoda, H. (1994). Learning perceptually-chunked macro operators. in K. Furukawa, D. Michie, and S. Muggleton (eds.) Machine Intelligence, 13, Oxford University Press, pp.419-440.
Suwa, M. and Motoda, H. (1989). Frustration-based leaning in auxiliary-line problems in elementary geometry. Journal of Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 4(3), pp.308-320. (in Japanese)