Ronald A. Finke

"Surrogate percept, allowing people to detect some pattern or property in a remembered scene that they did not encode explicitly when they saw the scene initially."

"Perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be "interpreted" much like physical objects."

"The image discoveries which then ’emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects."

"Restricting the ways in which creative cognition are interpreted encourages creative exploration and discovery and further reduces the likelihood that a person will fall back on conventional lines of thought."

"Finke et al. (1992) proposed a cognitive model of creative thinking called geneplore, a name that emphasizes the importance of generative and exploratory phases of the creative process. In the generative phase, one uses processes such as retrieval, analogical transfer, or mental transformation to construct representations of ideas that may take various forms such as visual patterns, verbal combinations, or mental models. These initial ideas, referred to as preinventive forms, ideally have properties such as novelty, meaningfulness, and emergent qualities. Exploratory processes can then be used to develop the initially generated ideas for specific purposes."