CREATIVE PERCEPTION AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF CONSTRUCTING NEW EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Relevance of the study. The growing complexity and uncertainty of the contemporary information environment changes the psychological requirements for perception. A person encounters not only an increasing amount of information but also incomplete, ambiguous and structurally heterogeneous stimuli that require selection, interpretation and reconstruction. Under these conditions, perception cannot be reduced to passive registration of external properties. It becomes an active process in which previous experience, perceptual hypotheses, categorization, analogizing and thinking strategies participate in constructing a meaningful representation of reality. The problem of creative perception is therefore important for explaining how new experience is formed when a person deals with unfamiliar visual and informational material. A separate theoretical issue concerns aesthetic perception, since visual form, composition, expressiveness and stylistic organization require differentiated processing and may create conditions for multiple interpretations and creative transformation of experience.

Methods. The study uses theoretical analysis, comparison, conceptual synthesis and systematization of Ukrainian and international psychological approaches to creative thinking, creative construction, processing of new information, visual perception and aesthetic experience. The strategic approach to creative thinking developed in Ukrainian psychology of creativity is considered together with research on creative construction and thinking strategies involved in constructing an image of the world. Contemporary models of aesthetic processing and studies of aesthetic abilities are used to clarify the role of perceptual differentiation, categorization, interpretation and evaluation in constructing new experience.

Conclusions. Creative perception is substantiated as an active process of constructing new experience in which sensory information is selected, differentiated, related to previous knowledge, reorganized and interpreted. Its creative character becomes most evident when a stimulus is novel, incomplete, ambiguous or allows several meaningful ways of organization. Analogizing, categorization, perceptual hypotheses, strategic transformation and evaluation are considered interrelated mechanisms of this process. Aesthetic perception represents a psychologically significant domain in which these mechanisms are especially visible. Aesthetic abilities are not identified with creative perception; they are considered individual psychological resources that can increase the differentiation and interpretive richness of visual experience.