A functional theory of creative reading: Process, knowledge, and evaluation

Reading is a complex cognitive behavior--as such, it represents an important aspect of general cognition; the benefits of having a theory of reading would be far-reaching. Additionally, there is an aspect of reading which has been largely ignored, namely, reading appears to encompass a creative process. This dissertation presents a theory of creative reading. There are not separate reading behaviors, some mundane and some creative; instead, all of reading must be understood as a creative process. Therefore, a comprehensive theory of reading and creativity is needed. Unfortunately, although the scientific study of reading has been undertaken for almost a century, it is often done in a piecemeal fashion--that is, the research has often concentrated on a narrow aspect of reading behavior. This work identifies a set of tasks which sufficiently covers the reading process for short narratives. Together, these tasks form the basis of a functional theory of reading.; Using the reading framework as support, a theory of creative understanding is produced, explaining the process by which novel concepts come to be understood by a reasoner. A taxonomy of novelty types, a knowledge representation and ontology of sufficient flexibility to permit the representation of a wide-range of conceptual forms, and an interlocking set of four tasks (memory retrieval, analogical mapping, base-constructive analogy, and problem reformulation) act together to produce the behavior. The technique for base-constructive analogy is one of the more unique features of this work; it permits existing concepts to be combined in ways which enable novel concepts to be understood.; The theory of creative reading is instantiated in a computer model, the ISAAC system, which reads and comprehends short science fiction stories. The model has permitted empirical evaluation, providing an important stage in the overall theory revision cycle. The evaluation demonstrated that ISAAC can answer independently-generated comprehension questions about a set of science fiction stories with skill comparable to a group of college students. This result, along with an analysis of the internal workings of the model supports the claim that the theory of creative reading is sufficient to explain important aspects of the behavior.