Mind Menagerie 🧠✏️

Mind Menagerie is a creativity training app grounded in cognitive science concepts. You can generate fun ideas for art and writing and increase your overall capacity for creative thinking by playing these exercises based on principles from creative cognition research. See what creative ideas you can come up with and comment your favorites below!

How to use

Select an activity, Analogies or Conceptual Combinations, to get a prompt. You can use this prompt however you like! Write, draw, or think of an answer, or try to list as many new ideas as you can. You can add up to 2 constraints to your prompt to make it more difficult. Press the round-arrow button to generate a new prompt.

About the creator

Hi, I'm pixachar! I'm an indie game developer, artist, engineer, and computer science master's student. I've been making creative software for about a decade now! Please feel free to check out my other games on my itch.io page and follow me on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. You can also wishlist my upcoming game on Steam! If you liked this app, share with friends! Thanks so much for your support, it means the world to me ♡

Citations

Cognitive science is a spectacular interdisciplinary field that sits at the intersection of computer science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and more. This project focused on how our brains produce creativity. Here are the key research papers that informed the design and development of this app. Give them a read if you're interested!

• C. Tromp, "Integrated Constraints in Creativity: Foundations for a Unifying Model," Review of General Psychology, vol. 27, no. 1, pp 41-61, Dec 2011, doi: 10.1177/10892680211060027.
• S. Ritter and N. Mostert, "Enhancement of Creative Thinking Skills Using a Cognitive-Based Creativity Training," J Cogn Enhanc, vol. 1, pp. 243–253, Oct 2016, doi: 10.1007/s41465-016-0002-3.
• K. Holyoak, N. Ichien, and H. Lu, "Analogy and the Generation of Ideas," Creativity Research Journal, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 532–543, Jul 2023, doi: 10.1080/10400419.2023.2232673.
• F. Costello and M. Keane, "Efficient Creativity: Constraint-Guided Conceptual Combination," Cognitive Science, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 299–349, Apr 2000, doi: 10.1016/S0364-0213(00)00020-3.
• W. Wan and C. Chiu, "Effects of Novel Conceptual Combination on Creativity," Journal of Creative Behavior, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 227–240, Dec 2011, doi: 10.1002/j.2162-6057.2002.tb01066.x.
• P. Thagard, Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Science. 2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

And special thanks to the staff at Georgia Institute of Technology OMSCS!