Cryptic Re-perception: A Cognitive Framework for Creative-Critical Thinking

Abstract:Contemporary models of thinking frequently distinguish between creativity, defined as the generation of novel ideas, and critical thinking, defined as the evaluation of those ideas. While this distinction has been influential across cognitive science and education, it leaves underexamined a fundamental component of reasoning: the process by which problems themselves are interpreted and represented. This paper introduces cryptic re-perception as a distinct cognitive operation grounded explicitly in the cognitive and neural mechanisms of cryptic crossword solving, a domain that requires solvers to deliberately inhibit misleading surface readings and construct latent, non-obvious interpretations from the same linguistic material. Drawing on Ohlsson’s Representational Change Theory, predictive processing accounts of cognition, dual-process theories, research on insight problem solving, and the emerging AI literature on cryptic crossword disambiguation, the paper argues that many failures in reasoning arise not from deficits in idea generation or evaluation, but from fixation on initial interpretations shaped by prior experience. Critically, the paper addresses a gap in prior frameworks: the expansion grid proposed to operationalise structured reinterpretation is distinguished from existing heuristic tools such as SCAMPER and de Bono’s Thinking Hats by its grounding in semantic network dynamics and its derivation from attested neural mechanisms of inhibitory control and associative expansion. The paper further integrates this model with contemporary neuroscience and identifies three falsifiable predictions that distinguish cryptic re-perception from these prior frameworks and discusses an empirical research programme needed to test them. Real-world implications are examined across domains including education, decision-making, and human–artificial intelligence interaction, where the consistent failure of large language models on cryptic crossword benchmarks provides a concrete, measurable index of the reinterpretation gap the framework addresses. Keywords: cryptic re-perception, creative-critical thinking, representational change, predictive processing, insight, inhibitory control, large language models, cryptic crosswords