Can young children control their creativity? The role of executive function in modifying creative processes

• In Event: Building on divergent thinking: Expanding approaches to measuring children’s creativity

Abstract

Claims that creativity declines after childhood implicitly suggest that the development of executive function (EF) skills - which underlie top-down, goal-directed thought - is counterproductive to creativity. Research with adult populations suggests that top-down regulation can constrain some aspects of the creative process (e.g., failing to perceive cues that might spark new ideas) while supporting others (e.g., generating ideas strategically and evaluating their quality) (Chrysikou, 2018). Links between executive processes and creative task performance appear to depend on the nature of the task and the aspects of the creative process it taps into. For instance, asking adults to “be creative” during a divergent thinking (idea-generation) task has been found to strengthen the link between executive skills and creativity of ideas, suggesting that adults use executive skills to modify their ideation based on task goals (Nusbaum et al., 2014). Whether EF functions similarly in children’s creative processes, however, remains unclear. Research on the early childhood period is particularly sparse. Only a handful of studies have examined the link between young children’s EF and creative task performance, and even fewer have considered how aspects of the creative task might affect the role of EF.

This project investigated whether young children, like adults, use EF to modify their idea generation when explicitly asked to “be creative.” 148 typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (most of them White, non-Hispanic, and from high-income homes) participated in a remote video call with a researcher. They completed behavioral tasks to assess verbal skills and EF, as well as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) – a traditional divergent thinking task in which they generated uses for objects (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). During the AUT, children were randomly asked to either come up with “as many ideas as you can” or come up with “ideas that are creative, [meaning] unusual, different, funny, or […] new to you.” The effect of these instructions on the creativity of children’s ideas varied depending on their EF skills, B = 0.19, p = .03. Children with relatively high EF scores (>1.2 standard deviations above the sample mean) generated more creative ideas when asked to “be creative,” but this effect was not seen in children with lower EF scores (Figure 1). AUT instructions did not affect the number of ideas generated (fluency), regardless of EF. Rather, EF showed a small negative main effect on fluency after controlling for age, temperamental surgency, and verbal skills (p < .05). The results suggest that 5- to 6-year-olds from a Western, relatively high-income population tend to approach idea-generation tasks in a spontaneous, bottom-up way but can also use EF skills to modify their ideation according to explicit task goals. How exactly children use their EF skills to modify their ideation remains an open question. However, the results clearly indicate that studies seeking to pinpoint the role of EF in young children’s creativity should carefully consider the task goals, children’s understanding of the task, and how these relate to scoring procedures.

Authors

• Julie Vaisarova, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie M Carlson, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities