Psychology Department, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Psychology Department, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Cognition. 2022 Aug;225:105102. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105102. Epub 2022 Mar 27.
How does creativity develop? Creativity is a multi-faceted behavior and thus it is difficult to find measures for creativity that are both precise and comparable across development. Here, we examine the development of creativity using a "creative foraging" task. The task measures different facets of creativity which we compare between 4- to 8-year-old children and adults. We find that compared to adults, children spend a higher percentage of their search exploring, and their exploitation phases are less efficient. Moreover, children orient their search to a different and smaller region of the search space, but within that space they produce more unique creative products. Lastly, as children grow up, their creative products become more adult-like and their uniqueness decreases. Together, these results suggest that creative search changes across development, in the search strategy employed, in how the space of possibilities is navigated, and in what ideas are ultimately chosen.
创造力是如何发展的？创造力是一种多方面的行为，因此很难找到既精确又能在发展过程中进行比较的创造力衡量标准。在这里，我们使用“创造性觅食”任务来研究创造力的发展。该任务衡量了创造力的不同方面，我们在 4 至 8 岁的儿童和成年人之间进行了比较。我们发现，与成年人相比，儿童在搜索探索阶段花费的比例更高，而在利用阶段的效率较低。此外，儿童将搜索方向指向搜索空间的不同且较小的区域，但在该空间内，他们会产生更多独特的创意产品。最后，随着儿童的成长，他们的创意产品变得更像成年人，独特性降低。总之，这些结果表明，创造性搜索在发展过程中会发生变化，表现在所采用的搜索策略、如何在可能性空间中导航以及最终选择什么想法上。
