The Development of Divergent Thinking in 4- to 6-Year-Old Children

Abstract

This study investigated the development of divergent thinking (DT) in early childhood. We followed 107 4-year-olds for 1.5 years. Children’s DT was assessed with the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) every 6 months, four times in total. Within the AUT, children were asked to generate unusual uses of common objects while explaining how they came up with these uses. Based on the generated uses, two product measures were computed: fluency and originality. We also applied process measures to gain insight into the thinking processes children used to come up with uses. Based on the coded data of children’s verbal explanations of how they generated uses, two process measures were computed: memory retrieval (retrieving uses from episodic and semantic long-term memory) and mental operations (performing mental operations on the object to generate a use). The results revealed substantial growth in fluency and originality with age. The frequencies of occurrence of both memory retrieval and mental operations also increased with age. In line with previous findings, this longitudinal study shows that creativity develops throughout early childhood. Moreover, this study adds to the current knowledge base by providing researchers a first glance at the development of thinking processes underlying DT in this age range.