The Ubiquity of Cross-Domain Thinking in the Early Phase of the Creative Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To what extent are creative processes in one domain (e.g., technology) affected by information from other domains (e.g., music)? While some studies of professional creators suggest that creative abilities are domain-specific, other studies suggest that creative avocations stimulate creativity. The latter is consistent with the predictions of the honing theory of creativity, according to which the iterative process culminating in a creative work is made possible by the self-organizing nature of a conceptual network, or worldview, and its innate holistic tendency to minimize inconsistency. As such, the creative process is not restricted to the creative domain; influences from domains other than that of the final product are predicted to impact the creative process and its outcome. To assess the prevalence of cross-domain influences on creativity we conducted two studies: one with creative experts, and one with undergraduate students from diverse academic backgrounds. Participants listed both their creative outputs, and the influences (sources of inspiration) associated with each of these outputs. In both studies, cross-domain influences on creativity were found to be widespread, and indeed more frequent than within-domain sources of inspiration. Thus, examination of the inputs to, rather than the outputs of, creative tasks supported the prediction of honing theory that cross-domain influences are a ubiquitous component of the creative process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".