We have another BIG department shoutout to give! One of our graduate students, Visheeta Chandolia, has received a 2025 Psychonomic Society J. Frank Yates Student Travel Award.
Her research is about how creative ideas arise from combining concepts. Creativity is one of the most important drivers of innovation in today's world. But where do creative ideas come from? One way to generate a creative idea is to combine two ideas or concepts. When ideas are combined, the resulting product sometimes contains features that are unique to the combination, i.e. they are not characteristic of the constituent concepts. These unique features, called emergent properties, may help understand where creative ideas come from. Visheeta’s research proposes that when we combine ideas and elaborate on these ideas by generating multiple iterations of these combinations, we may see more emergent properties that may make these ideas truly novel and unique, suggesting that elaboration and iteration in conceptual combination may be one source of creative ideas. Visheeta also explores implications for developing a tool that uses emergent properties as a measure of creativity.
The award honors J. Frank Yates, who was a mentor and scientist driven by the cause of inclusion in science. “I was motivated to apply for this award because I believe creativity is a concept that cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It is influenced by culture, values, and knowledge, among other factors. For a comprehensive understanding of creative cognition, it is important to consider diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the nature and source of creativity, which is where I, as an Indian international student, hope to contribute to my science.”-Visheeta Chandolia