Unraveling children's creativity: a perception-action approach

Abstract

While having gained plenty of interest, research on creativity still faces challenges in understanding what creativity truly is and how it can be researched best. In this dissertation, I adopted a situated view and regard creativity as a process that unfolds in a concrete situation, contrasting the general view of seeing creativity as a static personal trait. The aim was to deepen our understanding of the nature of creativity and to reveal the processes that underlie the emergence of original ideas. In addition, how bilingualism, selective attention, and gaze behavior as sources of individual differences shape (the process of) creativity were also explored. Study 1 (a literature review) revealed that bilinguals outperform monolinguals on creative tasks, and this can be explained by their enriched conceptual system, their enhanced executive functioning and their experiences with multiple cultures. Next, we designed a real-life version of the Alternative Uses Task. Children aged 9-13 years old were asked to think of alternative uses of everyday objects in a low stimulus condition (with only the objects present on the table) and a high stimulus condition (with additional objects present on the table as well). Study 2 showed that children with better selective attention were relatively original in the low stimulus condition, whereas children with weaker selective attention performed relatively well in the high stimulus condition. Study 3 and 4 then further revealed that more exploration of the target objects as well as the reasoning with the perceivable properties of the object (i.e. technical reasoning) were related to more original responses. In particular, responses that implied the use of multiple technical properties and spatial transformation were rated as most creative by the jury. These findings underscore the situated nature of creativity, and suggest that studying the combined effect of situational characteristics and individual difference factors is promising.