This talk will have two major parts. The notion of continual evaluation of a creative product throughout the design process, and its necessary foundation in perception, have been largely overlooked in cognitive models of creativity. In Letter Spirit, we address this issue head-on. To this end, we have focused initial Letter Spirit work on a sophisticated and subtle model of gridletter perception. Our emergent model of letter perception is based on the hypothesis that letter categories are made up of conceptual constituents called roles.
Roles exert clear top-down influence on the segmentation of letterforms into structural components.
In Part II of the talk I will flesh out the role hypothesis, discuss a model of letter recognition implementing it, and present psychological evidence supporting the existence of roles in human perception of letters. Empirical results support the applicability of our emergent, cognitive architecture to the task of letter recognition.