  Creative processes are widely believed to involve the generation of multiple,
discrete, well-defined possibilities followed by exploration and selection. An
alternative, inspired by parallel distributed processing models of associative
memory, is that creativity involves the merging and interference of memory
items resulting in a single cognitive structure that is ill-defined, and can
thus be said to exist in a state of potentiality. We tested this hypothesis in
an experiment in which participants were interrupted midway through solving an
analogy problem and asked what they were thinking in terms of a solution. Naive
judges categorized their responses as AP if there was evidence of merging
solution sources from memory resulting in an ill-defined idea, and SM if there
was no evidence of this. Data from frequency counts and mean number of SM
versus AP judgments supported the hypothesis that midway through creative
processing an idea is in a potentiality state.
