Divergent thinking in Italian elementary school children: the key role of probabilistic reasoning style.

Abstract

Divergent thinking is widely recognised as an individual creative potential and an essential factor in fostering creativity since the early stages of life. Albeit previous research revealed that creativity could be pursued through controlled mental processes (e.g. reasoning), the debate about the impact of children's reasoning on divergent thinking and, ultimately, creativity is still open. The present study sought to deepen the relationships between probabilistic reasoning and divergent thinking in a sample of 106 Italian children (meanage = 8.64, SDage = 1.34; 58 F). The Beads Task was used to evaluate probabilistic reasoning, whereas the Alternative Uses Task was administered to assess divergent thinking. Results revealed that analytical, slow, and effortful forms of thought underpinned by high probabilistic competencies predict children's divergent production. These findings suggest that a higher score for divergence of thinking depends on a high involvement of reasoning style, which in this study relies on the ability to make probabilistic decisions in ambiguous situations. Future research directions were discussed.