Under the Super-Suit: What Superheroes Can Reveal About Inherited properties in Conceptual Blending

Conceptual blending has been proposed as the cognitive machinery for concept generation. While computational approaches to conceptual blending have been implemented with some success, the automatic approaches still struggle to consistently produce concepts and blends that ‘make sense’ and have value. Mechanisms and optimality principles for blending have been introduced, yet their formal integration remains sparse. In this paper, we suggest to partly bypass this problem by identifying some conceptual heuristics for blending. This is done through a top-down analysis of three prototypical superheroes, an exemplary domain for conceptual blends and human imagination. We formalise the superheroes and backtrace their properties into their respective input spaces and from there map the inherited properties to cognitive theories for conceptualisation. It is our belief that computational blending systems could greatly benefit from conceptual heuristics for blending, identified in this top-down fashion. As a proof of concept of the identified superhero-blending heuristics, we blend the superhero ‘Flowerman’.