Mark Eyjolfson

Toward a Formal Model of the Shifting Relationship between Concepts and Contexts during Associative Thought

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The quantum inspired State Context Property (SCOP) theory of concepts is unique amongst theories of concepts in offering a means of incorporating that for each concept in each different context there are an unlimited number of exemplars, or states, of varying degrees of typicality. Working with data from a study in which participants were asked to rate the typicality of exemplars of a concept for different contexts, and introducing an exemplar typicality threshold, we built a SCOP model of how states of a concept arise differently in associative versus analytic (or divergent and convergent) modes of thought. Introducing measures of state robustness and context relevance, we show that by varying the threshold, the relevance of different contexts changes, and seemingly atypical states can become typical. The formalism provides a pivotal step toward a formal explanation of creative thought proesses.

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