**4. Interpretation: making sense of novel experiences**

Emergence of original ideas from conceptual combination is not merely a process of memory retrieval from free association [29], neither is it the remote association [26] of concepts in one's knowledge network. When two seemingly unrelated ideas are retrieved from memory, an interpretation process is automatically activated in the human cognitive system, aiming to make sense and find meaning for the cooccurrence of these objects or events [19]. Finding a way to meaningfully connect two terms is the simplest form of relational thinking, a kind of abstract thinking [30]. It is this interpretation process that generates and adds new nodes to the memory network and makes the knowledge network grow by itself. On the one hand, because there are many possible ways to interpret the co-occurrence of concepts, objects, or events, the interpretative processes involve divergent thinking, thus making evaluation of the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of emerged ideas possible. On the other hand, the act of interpretation also requires convergent thinking because a new idea must be generated and chosen to account for the reason why these concepts co-occurred [7]. Three criteria were raised to evaluate whether the emerged new concepts from conceptual combination indeed made sense: diagnostic feasibility, plausibility, and informativeness. That is, the new concepts must

#### *A Model of Technological Imagination and Creativity: Cognitive Task Analysis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110020*

be derived from distinctive feature or meaning of the given concepts, be a plausible explanation of the co-occurrence of these given concepts, and add something new when combined [31]. For example, "that lawyer is a shark" would automatically generate an image of a (greedy and reckless) lawyer with sharp teeth and biting, rather than a lawyer with a fish tail.

People use three kinds of interpretation to associate two unrelated words: 1. conjunctive interpretation, 2. property transfer interpretation, and 3. relational interpretation [27]. In conjunctive interpretation, new ideas emerge from finding property overlap of concepts to be combined. For example, "vitamin C" is the concept that emerges from the combination of the concepts "*banana–apple*." In property transfer interpretation, new concepts emerge by giving the unique property of one concept to another concept. For example, the combination of the two concepts "*lily–light*" may produce the response "lily-shaped desk lamp." In the relational interpretation, a mediating concept is introduced to link two concepts such that the initially unrelated concepts become related. For example, "*lavender–beer*" may produce a response such as "beer party in a lavender garden." Two subtypes of conjunctive interpretation were also observed [32]. Other than finding a common property for the two concepts in conceptual combination, the mapping/conjunction between two concepts can also occur at a more global level or at a structural level. This type of mapping is usually accomplished by analogy. For example, the concept of an airplane is structurally analogous to a bird generated from *"fly like a bird*." Another unique type of conjunctive interpretation is "negation;" the new concept is obtained by a negative interpretation of the common property found between two concepts, for example, "darkness" as a response counter to the property "brightness" derived from *light-rationality* pair. Originality of new concepts emerging from different types of interpretation may be quite different in terms of whether the original concepts are modified or whether the new concept entails using the original concepts to create a broader meaning.
