The Enactive Model of Creativity for Co-Creative AI and Human-AI Interaction

Creativity as Participation

-Nicholas Davis

Abstract

Creativity is often described as the generation of novel and valuable ideas through internal cognitive processes such as association, combination, search, or problem solving. While these approaches have contributed significantly to creativity research, they frequently treat creativity as a phenomenon occurring primarily within the mind of an isolated individual. This essay proposes an alternative perspective based on enactive cognition. The Enactive Model of Creativity argues that creativity emerges through ongoing interaction between cognitive systems and their environments rather than through internal idea generation alone. Creativity is understood as a process of participatory sense-making in which perception, action, intention, and environmental feedback continuously shape one another.

The model introduces creativity as a dynamic regulatory process involving multiple cognitive modes that influence how individuals perceive opportunities, organize attention, and engage with the world. Central to the framework are the concepts of clamping and unclamping, which describe shifts between focused coordination and exploratory openness. The essay further develops the distinction between functional unclamping and interactional unclamping, describing how consciousness can regulate its coupling either toward environmental information or toward internally generated structures such as memory, imagination, and conceptual models. Through this perspective, creativity becomes a process of adaptive regulation between exploration, imagination, and coordinated action.

The Enactive Model of Creativity serves as an early foundation for later developments in Creative Sense-Making, Perceptual Logic, the Enactive Model of Consciousness, human–AI co-creation, and Enactive Regulation Theory. Rather than locating creativity solely within individuals, the model positions creativity as an emergent property of participation within a continuously evolving world.

Introduction

Creativity remains one of the most important and least understood aspects of cognition. Across psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, education, and the arts, researchers have long sought to explain how novel ideas emerge and how individuals generate solutions that extend beyond existing patterns of thought. Traditional theories have often approached creativity as an internal process involving mental representation, idea combination, divergent thinking, problem solving, or search through conceptual spaces. While these perspectives have produced valuable insights, they frequently assume that creativity originates primarily within the mind of an individual creator.

The Enactive Model of Creativity begins from a different starting point.

Rather than viewing creativity as the production of ideas inside the mind, this framework proposes that creativity emerges through interaction between cognitive systems and their environments. Novelty is not simply generated internally and then projected outward. Instead, novelty emerges through recursive cycles of perception, action, reflection, and environmental response. Creative thought is therefore not detached from the world but fundamentally embedded within it.

This perspective draws from enactive cognition, which argues that cognition is not the passive processing of information but the active construction of meaning through embodied engagement with an environment. From an enactive perspective, perception is not merely the reception of sensory input, and action is not merely the execution of decisions. Perception and action form a continuous loop through which organisms actively participate in the creation of meaningful worlds. Creativity emerges within this loop.

As individuals engage with materials, environments, tools, concepts, and other people, they encounter affordances—opportunities for action that become available through interaction. Actions alter the environment. Environmental changes alter future perception. New possibilities emerge. Through this ongoing process, creative systems do not merely discover novelty; they enact it.

The Enactive Model of Creativity was developed to explain how creative cognition can move between different forms of engagement with the world. Rather than assuming a single creative process, the model proposes that creativity operates through multiple cognitive modes that regulate attention, perception, exploration, and coordination. These modes influence which affordances become visible, which ideas become salient, and how individuals navigate complex creative spaces.

To describe these transitions, the framework introduced the concepts of clamping and unclamping. Clamping refers to periods of focused cognitive organization in which attention and action become tightly coordinated around a task, goal, or conceptual structure. Unclamping refers to periods of exploratory openness in which cognition becomes more flexible, allowing new associations, perceptions, and possibilities to emerge. Creativity depends not on remaining within either state, but on regulating movement between them.

The present essay revisits and expands this framework by introducing a more explicit account of how consciousness regulates its relationship with both internal models and external environments. Building upon the concepts of Perceptual Logic and dynamic cognitive modes, the model distinguishes between functional unclamping and interactional unclamping. Functional unclamping describes shifts toward environmental engagement and exploratory perception, while interactional unclamping describes shifts toward imagination, conceptual recombination, and internally generated structures. Together, these processes provide a regulatory account of how creative systems navigate between environmental discovery and mental simulation.

Viewed in this way, creativity is not merely the generation of ideas. Creativity is the adaptive regulation of participation itself. It emerges through the continuous negotiation between imagination and observation, exploration and coordination, internal models and environmental structure. The creative mind is therefore not best understood as an isolated generator of novelty, but as a dynamic system that learns how to move between different modes of engagement in order to bring new possibilities into existence.

Creativity as Participation

Traditional theories often describe creativity as something that happens inside the mind. Ideas are generated, combined, evaluated, and selected through internal cognitive processes. While these approaches have contributed valuable insights, they often overlook a fundamental reality: creativity unfolds through ongoing interaction between a person and their environment.

The Enactive Model of Creativity begins with a different assumption. Creativity is not simply the production of novel ideas within an isolated individual. Creativity emerges through active engagement with a world that continuously responds to our actions. Rather than asking, “How does a person generate a creative idea?”, the enactive perspective asks: How does a cognitive system participate in an environment such that novel possibilities emerge through interaction?

Creativity is therefore understood as a process of sense-making. Through perception, action, reflection, and adaptation, individuals continually construct and reconstruct meaning within an evolving field of possibilities.

Enactive Cognition and Creativity

The model draws inspiration from enactive cognition, which proposes that cognition is not the manipulation of internal representations but the active creation of meaning through embodied interaction with the world. Perception is not passive observation. Action is not merely execution. Instead, perception and action form a continuous loop.

As individuals interact with their environment, they discover affordances, opportunities for action that were previously unavailable. Each action changes the environment. These changes alter future perceptions. New opportunities emerge. Creativity arises through this recursive process. Novelty is therefore not simply generated internally. It is enacted through interaction.

Cognitive Modes

One of the central contributions of the Enactive Model of Creativity is the idea that creative cognition operates through multiple cognitive modes. Creative individuals do not think in the same way throughout the entire creative process. Instead, cognition shifts between different patterns of attention, exploration, evaluation, and engagement. Some modes emphasize broad exploration and the discovery of possibilities. Other modes emphasize coordination, refinement, and execution.

These modes influence:

What is perceived
Which affordances become salient
How ideas are evaluated
Which actions are taken

Creativity emerges not from remaining in a single mode, but from moving effectively between modes as circumstances require.

Clamping and Unclamping

To describe these transitions, the Enactive Model of Creativity introduced the concepts of clamping and unclamping.

Clamping

Clamping occurs when cognition becomes tightly organized around a particular task, goal, concept, or activity. Attention narrows. Perception becomes highly selective. Actions become coordinated toward a specific objective. Clamping is valuable because it enables sustained effort, detailed refinement, and the development of coherent structures. Many forms of expertise depend upon the ability to remain clamped to a task long enough for complex patterns to emerge.

Examples include:

Finishing a manuscript
Refining a scientific theory
Completing a painting
Solving a technical problem

Without clamping, creative activity often remains diffuse and fragmented.

Unclamping

Unclamping is the complementary process. Attention broadens. Perception becomes more exploratory. Previously ignored possibilities become visible. Novel associations emerge. Unclamping allows cognitive systems to escape local attractors and discover new pathways for action. It creates opportunities for surprise, exploration, and creative transformation.

Examples include:

Daydreaming
Improvisation
Free sketching
Brainstorming
Wandering through unfamiliar environments

Without unclamping, cognition becomes rigid and repetitive.

Creativity as Oscillation

Creative performance depends upon the ability to move between clamped and unclamped states. Too much clamping can produce fixation. Too much unclamping can produce chaos. Creative individuals continuously regulate this balance. Exploration generates possibilities. Coordination stabilizes possibilities. Creativity emerges through oscillation between these complementary processes.

Functional and Interactional Unclamping

A central feature of the Enactive Model of Creativity is that cognition is not fixed. Rather, consciousness continuously regulates how strongly perception is coupled to internal knowledge and external information. This process can be visualized through the movement of the conscious system between the mental model and the environment. The model consists of three primary components:

The Mental Model
The Environment
Consciousness

Within consciousness, intention influences perception through a regulatory mechanism called Perceptual Logic. Perceptual Logic determines which information becomes salient and how perception is organized. The position of consciousness relative to the mental model and environment determines the current cognitive mode.

The Clamped State

In a balanced clamped state, consciousness maintains a coordinated relationship between the mental model and environmental information. Perception is informed by both internal expectations and external evidence. This state supports coherent action, stable understanding, and sustained creative work. Most goal-directed activity occurs within some form of clamped engagement. However, creativity often requires temporary departures from this equilibrium.

Functional Unclamping

Functional unclamping occurs when consciousness shifts toward the environment. In this mode, the system loosens its dependence on prior assumptions and becomes increasingly responsive to incoming information. Attention broadens. Environmental affordances become more salient. Unexpected patterns become visible. Novel opportunities emerge.

Functional unclamping can therefore be understood as an inspecting mode of cognition. The individual actively explores the environment in search of information that may challenge, extend, or reorganize existing understanding.

Examples include:

Observing unfamiliar situations
Exploring reference materials
Experimenting with new techniques
Gathering inspiration
Investigating anomalies and surprises

During functional unclamping, perception is primarily driven by environmental structure rather than by the mental model. The world becomes the dominant source of cognitive organization.

Interactional Unclamping

Interactional unclamping occurs when consciousness shifts toward the mental model. In this mode, environmental information becomes less dominant and internally generated structure plays a greater role in shaping perception. Memory, imagination, conceptual associations, and prior experience begin to organize what is perceived. Rather than inspecting the world, the system explores its own internal possibilities.

This mode supports:

Imagination
Conceptual blending
Mental simulation
Narrative construction
Speculative reasoning
Creative ideation

Interactional unclamping allows cognition to temporarily decouple from immediate environmental constraints. The mental model becomes a generative force that populates perception with possibilities that do not yet exist in the environment. Many creative insights arise during interactional unclamping because the system can reorganize concepts without being constrained by current reality.

Creativity Through Dynamic Regulation

Creativity emerges through movement between these modes. Functional unclamping allows the system to discover novel information in the environment. Interactional unclamping allows the system to reorganize information through imagination and internal simulation. Clamping stabilizes the resulting insights into coherent action. The creative process therefore involves continuous regulation between:

Environmental exploration
Internal exploration
Coordinated action

Rather than treating creativity as idea generation alone, the Enactive Model of Creativity views creativity as the adaptive regulation of cognitive coupling between the mind and the world. Creative individuals are not simply better idea generators. They are often better regulators of when to trust the environment, when to trust imagination, and when to coordinate both into purposeful action.

Toward Later Theories

This distinction between functional and interactional unclamping foreshadows later developments in Creative Sense-Making, Perceptual Logic, the Enactive Model of Consciousness, and Enactive Regulation Theory. The model suggests that cognition can intentionally regulate its position within a spectrum between environmental coupling and model-based coupling. Creativity emerges not from either extreme alone, but from the dynamic movement between them.

Dynamic Perception

A key insight of the model is that creativity is fundamentally perceptual. Creative breakthroughs often occur not because new information appears, but because existing information is perceived differently. As cognitive modes change, the environment itself appears different. Different affordances become visible. Different interpretations become available. Different actions become possible. This process of perceptual reorganization is one of the primary engines of creative insight. Creativity therefore depends not only on generating ideas but on learning how to perceive differently.

Creativity as Regulation

Viewed through this lens, creativity becomes a regulatory process. Creative systems continually regulate:

Attention
Perception
Exploration
Coordination
Engagement with the environment

The goal is not to maximize novelty or maximize structure. Instead, creativity emerges through the adaptive regulation of both. Novelty without structure becomes incoherent. Structure without novelty becomes stagnant. Creative systems maintain themselves in the productive tension between these extremes.

Legacy and Influence

The Enactive Model of Creativity laid the foundation for later developments in co-creative AI, participatory sense-making, interaction dynamics, and Enactive Regulation Theory. Many concepts that would later appear in these frameworks first emerged here:

Dynamic cognitive modes
Creative regulation
Participatory creativity
Human–AI collaboration
Sense-making through interaction
Clamping and unclamping
Creativity as an adaptive process

Most importantly, the model shifted the focus of creativity research away from isolated minds and toward the dynamics of interaction itself. Creativity is not something a person possesses. Creativity is something that emerges through participation in a changing world.

Discussion

The Enactive Model of Creativity emerged during a period when both creativity research and artificial intelligence were still largely influenced by information-processing theories of cognition. Creativity was frequently described as the manipulation of internal representations, the search through conceptual spaces, or the generation and evaluation of ideas within isolated minds. While these approaches provided useful explanatory frameworks, they often struggled to account for improvisation, collaboration, environmental participation, and the fluid dynamics that characterize many real-world creative practices.

The enactive perspective proposed a different foundation. Rather than locating creativity exclusively within internal cognitive processes, the model argued that creativity emerges through continuous interaction between cognitive systems and their environments. Novelty is not simply generated internally and expressed outward. Instead, novelty arises through recursive cycles of perception, action, feedback, and adaptation. Creativity is enacted through participation.

This shift has important implications for both human creativity and artificial intelligence. If creativity emerges through interaction rather than isolated computation alone, then creative systems cannot be fully understood by analyzing internal mechanisms in isolation. The dynamics of interaction become part of the creative process itself. Meaning, affordances, opportunities, and even problems emerge through engagement with an environment rather than existing as fixed structures waiting to be discovered.

The concepts of clamping and unclamping provide an early regulatory framework for understanding how creative systems navigate this process. Creative cognition is not maximized through unrestricted exploration, nor through permanent focus. Instead, creativity depends upon the ability to regulate movement between exploratory and coordinative states. This regulatory perspective foreshadows later developments in adaptive cognition, interaction dynamics, and participatory sense-making.

The distinction between functional and interactional unclamping further expands this framework by showing that creativity involves more than simply varying attention. Consciousness can regulate the degree to which perception is organized by environmental information or by internally generated structures such as memory, imagination, and conceptual models. Functional unclamping allows the system to discover new information in the world. Interactional unclamping allows the system to reorganize information through internal simulation and imaginative recombination. Creativity emerges through the dynamic negotiation between these complementary forms of exploration.

Viewed retrospectively, the Enactive Model of Creativity also serves as an early conceptual bridge between creativity research and later work in co-creative AI. Many of the principles that would eventually shape human–AI collaboration were already present in this framework. The model emphasized participation over output, interaction over isolated generation, and dynamic coupling over static representation. These ideas would later influence the development of co-creative systems such as Drawing Apprentice, Creative Sense-Making, and broader theories of interaction-centered intelligence.

The framework also anticipated later developments in Perceptual Logic, the Enactive Model of Consciousness, and Enactive Regulation Theory. In each case, cognition is understood not as a fixed computational process but as a continuously regulated relationship between internal organization and environmental engagement. The movement between functional and interactional unclamping can therefore be interpreted as an early account of how cognitive systems regulate their coupling to different sources of sense-making.

Perhaps most importantly, the model suggests that creativity is not a special faculty separate from cognition. Creativity emerges from the same fundamental processes that allow cognitive systems to perceive, adapt, learn, and participate in the world. The creative process becomes an intensified expression of sense-making itself.

Conclusion

The Enactive Model of Creativity proposes a fundamental reframing of how creativity is understood. Rather than treating creativity as the internal generation of ideas within isolated minds, the framework positions creativity as an emergent process arising through interaction between cognitive systems and their environments. Novelty is not merely produced; it is enacted through participation. Drawing upon enactive cognition, the model argues that perception, action, intention, and environmental feedback form a continuous loop through which creative possibilities emerge. Creative cognition is therefore not static. It operates through dynamic cognitive modes that regulate how individuals engage with both internal models and external realities.

The concepts of clamping and unclamping provide a regulatory account of how creative systems balance exploration and coordination. Functional unclamping enables discovery through environmental engagement, while interactional unclamping enables imagination, conceptual recombination, and internal simulation. Clamping stabilizes these processes into coherent action. Creativity emerges not from any single state, but from the adaptive movement between them. This perspective transforms creativity from a process of idea production into a process of regulated participation. Creative individuals are not simply generators of novelty. They are regulators of attention, perception, engagement, and sense-making across changing circumstances.

The significance of this framework extends beyond creativity alone. By emphasizing interaction, dynamic coupling, and participatory meaning-making, the Enactive Model of Creativity provides an early foundation for later developments in co-creative AI, Creative Sense-Making, Perceptual Logic, the Enactive Model of Consciousness, and Enactive Regulation Theory. Many of the central themes that would later define these frameworks—including interaction dynamics, adaptive regulation, cognitive modes, and participatory cognition—first appear here in embryonic form.

Seen in this light, the Enactive Model of Creativity is not simply a theory of creative thought. It is an early theory of cognition as adaptive participation. Creativity becomes one expression of a more general principle: cognitive systems continuously bring forth new possibilities by regulating how they engage with themselves, with others, and with the worlds they inhabit.

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