Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information but also seeing relationships among collected information resources and developing new ideas. The hypothesis presented here is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery.

A new experimental method is developed, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. The efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections is compared with an alternative representation, combinFormation's composition of image and text surrogates. Representing collections with such compositions increases emergence in information discovery.