Can Young Children Control Their Creativity? Examining the Role of Executive Function in Modifying Children’s Creative Processes

Abstract

Claims that creativity declines after early childhood often imply that the development of executive function (EF) skills, which underlie goal-directed thought, is antithetical to creativity. Research with adults suggests that top-down regulation can both constrain idea-generation and support aspects of creativity, such as generating ideas strategically and evaluating their quality. Asking adults to “be creative” during a divergent thinking (idea-generation) task strengthens the link between creativity of ideas and executive skills, suggesting that adults use these skills to modify their ideation (Nusbaum et al., 2014). Whether EF functions similarly in children’s creative processes, however, remains unclear. This project investigated whether young children use EF to modify their idea-generation when 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 video call with a researcher. During this call they completed behavioral tasks to assess verbal skills and EF, as well as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) – a divergent thinking task in which they generated uses for objects. In 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.” The effect of these instructions on children’s creativity depended on EF; children with relatively high EF scores generated more creative ideas when asked to “be creative,” but this effect was not seen in children with lower EF scores. Instructions did not affect the number of ideas generated (fluency), regardless of EF. Rather, EF showed a small negative effect on fluency after controlling for age, surgency, and verbal skills. The results suggest that 5- to 6-year-olds from a Western, relatively high-income population tend to approach idea-generation tasks in a relatively spontaneous, bottom-up way but can also use their EF skills to modify their ideational process according to task goals. How exactly children use their EF skills to modify their ideation remains a question for future research.