  Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and
generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and
refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum
approach to describing how concepts interact, posits that what appears to be
discrete, separate ideas are actually different projections of the same
underlying mental representation, which can be described as a superposition
state, and which may take different outward forms when reflected upon from
different perspectives. As creative thought proceeds, this representation loses
potentiality to be viewed from different perspectives and manifest as different
outcomes. Honing theory yields different predictions from conventional theories
about the mental representation of an idea midway through the creative process.
These predictions were pitted against one another in two studies: one
closed-ended and one open-ended. In the first study, participants were
interrupted midway through solving an analogy problem and wrote down what they
were thinking in terms of a solution. In the second, participants were
instructed to create a painting that expressed their true essence and describe
how they conceived of the painting. For both studies, na\"ive judges
categorized these responses as supportive of either the conventional view or
the honing theory view. The results of both studies were significantly more
consistent with the predictions of honing theory. Some implications for
creative cognition, and cognition in general, are discussed.
