steven m. smith
≡

Professor, Psychology
Research Coordinator: TAMU Institute for Applied Creativity

Google Scholar
stevesmith tamu.edu, (979) 845-2509,

I was the first cognitive psychologist at Texas A&M University, arriving in 1980, and I have built the cognitive psychology area, both in terms of students (we now have a Ph.D. program) and faculty (we now have seven faculty in the cognitive area). I have also had a founding and continuing role in ARMADILLO, the cognitive psychology society of Texas and the Southwest since 1990. With my colleagues Tom Ward and Ron Finke, I helped define the creative cognition paradigm, an approach to the studies of both cognitive science and creativity. I am the Coordinator of Research for the Texas A&M University Institute for Applied Creativity, an interdisciplinary entity that encourages, supports, and oversees work in creative studies. I continue to work on interdisciplinary research projects with mechanical engineers, business school researchers, and computer scientists.

I have developed methods for examining aspects of the creative process in laboratory research, and results on blocked, recovered, and false memories. My experimental work on context-dependent memory influenced techniques that are used forensically to enhance eyewitness memory. My interdisciplinary work connects creative cognition to activities in engineering design, business, and computer science.

publications (selected)

Kerne, A., Smith, S.M., Choi, H., Graeber, R., Caruso, D. (2005) Evaluating Navigational Surrogate Formats with Divergent Browsing Tasks, Proc ACM CHI 2005.
Kerne, A., Smith, S.M. (2004) The Information Discovery Framework. Proc ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2004, 357-360.
Shah, J.J., Smith, S.M., Vargas-Hernandez, N. (2003)
Metrics for Measuring Ideation Effectiveness, Design Studies, 24:2, 111-134.
Dodds, R. A., Ward, T.B., & Smith, S.M. (2003) Review of experimental literature on incubation in problem solving and creativity, in M. A. Runco (Ed.), Creativity research handbook, Vol. 3. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Ward, T.B., Smith, S.M., Finke, R.A. (1999) Creative Cognition, in Handbook of creativity, Sternberg, R.J., ed, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press.
Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B., Finke, R.A. (1995) Principles, Paradoxes, and Prospects for the Future of Creative Cognition in Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B., Finke, R.A., The Creative Cognition Approach, Cambridge: MIT Press, 327-335.
Smith, S.M. (1994) Getting Into and Out of Mental Ruts: A theory of Fixation, Incubation, and Insight in Sternberg, R J., Davidson, J., The Nature of Insight, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994, 121-149.
Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B., Schumacher, J.S. (1993) Constraining effects of examples in a creative generation task, Memory & Cognition, 21, 837 845, 1993.
Smith, S.M., Blankenship, S.E. (1991) Incubation and the Persistence of Fixation in Problem Solving, Am Journ Psychology, 104, 61-87.