Collaborative Research: Pilot Research on Language-Based Strategies for Creative Problem Solving

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When people reformulate a problem space, previously unseen structure emerges. This process can be decomposed into two steps: People must first recognize and then exploit novel structure. We suggest that both of these steps can be improved by experienced application of creative nominalization. Here, nominalization refers to the process of recognizing a novel concept and naming it appropriately. This project demonstrates that experience in nominalization can improve problem solving and that successful training and experience on nominalization has the potential to enhance people?s intrinsic motivation, and thereby effectiveness, with respect to creative aspects of problem solving. In parallel, the project explores the potential for nominalization as a strategy to enhance machine-learning agents in reinforcement learning environments. Inspired by research on animal learning, reinforcement learning is a branch of artificial intelligence research concerned with creating motivated, learning agents. In the reinforcement-learning setting, nominalization has the potential to create a first-class object, something that can be directly manipulated, recorded, analyzed, and composed with other objects to form higher-order structures. In addition, reinforcement-learning researchers have recently begun to consider how learning might be enhanced with intrinsic motivation to explore problem spaces. Thus nominalization can function in reinforcement-learning settings both as a direct strategy and indirectly via intrinsic motivation. The most significant broader impact of this project will be to provide a new intervention that will enhance the creativity and efficacy of problem solvers working alone or in collaborative groups. If successful, the relative simplicity of the intervention and its general applicability would make it a prime candidate for wide dispersal to people in disparate walks of like.