Thinking Like A Child: The Role of Surface Similarities
               in Stimulating Creativity

                                             Bipin Indurkhya
                                Computer Science and Cognitive Science Dep.
                                          Jagiellonian University
                                             Kraków, Poland
                                      bipin.indurkhya@uj.edu.pl




                                                        Abstract
                       An oft-touted mantra for creativity is: think like a child. We focus on
                       one particular aspect of child-like thinking here, namely surface similar-
                       ities. Developmental psychology has convincingly demonstrated, time
                       and again, that younger children use surface similarities for categoriza-
                       tion and related tasks; only as they grow older they start to consider
                       functional and structural similarities. We consider examples of puzzles,
                       research on creative problem solving, and two of our recent empirical
                       studies to demonstrate how surface similarities can stimulate creative
                       thinking. We examine the implications of this approach for designing
                       creativity-support systems.




Copyright c by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
In: A.M. Olteteanu, Z. Falomir (eds.): Proceedings of ProSocrates 2017: Symposium on Problem-solving, Creativity and Spatial
Reasoning in Cognitive Systems, at Delmenhorst, Germany, July 2017, published at http://ceur-ws.org