Preconceptual Creativity

Creativity, whether seen in personal or historical scope, is always relative, subject to the contextual expectations of an observer. From the point of view of a creative agent, such expectations can be seen as soft constraints that must be violated in order to be deemed as creative. In the present work, learned conventions are modeled as emergent activity clusters (pre-concepts) in a self- organizing memory. That is used as a framework to model such phenomena as stereotypical categorization and mental inertia which restrain the mind when search- ing for new solutions. Using the kinematics of a robotic hand as an example, the models' dynamic behavior demonstrates primitive creativity without symbolic rea- soning. The model suggests cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain how expectations are formed and under which conditions an agent is able to break out of them and surprise itself.