Divergent Perception: Framing Creative Cognition Through the Lens of Sensory Flexibility
The Journal of Creative Behavior December 24, 2024 Antoine Bellemare‐Pepin, Karim Jerbi 4 citations
Creativity relies not only on divergent thinking but also on perceptual flexibility, especially when engaging with ambiguous stimuli. The authors propose a framework linking creativity to perception through sensory affordances, highlighting pareidolia—seeing familiar patterns in noise—as a key mechanism for generating novel ideas. They introduce "divergent perception" to describe active engagement with ambiguous sensory information, suggesting this process may explain heightened creativity in psychedelic and psychotic states. The role of attention in this process is explored, and future research directions are outlined, including manipulating stimulus characteristics and examining interactions between bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes.