Current accounts of creative cognition describe the conditions and correlates of creative output without providing a mechanistic architecture for the search process itself. This paper proposes the Feegle Architecture: a five-component model of parallel multi-modal retrieval and evaluation in creative thought, derived from detailed autoethnographic phenomenological evidence. The model's central claims are that creative search runs simultaneously across multiple cognitive modalities, each processing the same query through distinct representational formats; that a convergence detector fires when independent threads arrive at the same associative node from different directions, producing characteristic high-confidence, high-salience retrieval events; that the stopping criterion for creative search is not satisfaction (as in Simon's satisficing) nor optimality (as in maximising) but real-time metacognitive access to the search process itself; that the search process is self-exciting, with discovery generating neurochemical reward that energises further search; and that intrinsic motivation for exploration, not quality of evaluative judgment, is the primary engine of creative output. The model extends Dodson's interest-based account of attentional cognition with explicit mechanism, adds within-modality specificity to Kahneman's dual-process framework, and generates six testable predictions.
Storm Bjørn Temte (Fri,) studied this question.