Abstract
Taking a perception-action perspective, we investigated how the presence of different real objects in children’s immediate situation affected their creativity and whether this effect was moderated by their selective attention. Seventy children between ages 9 and 12 years old participated. Verbal responses on a visual Alternative Uses Task with a low stimulus and high stimulus condition were coded on fluency, flexibility, and originality. Selective attention was measured with a visual search task. Results showed that fluency was not affected by stimulus condition and was unrelated to selective attention. Flexibility was positively associated with selective attention. Originality, net of fluency and flexibility, showed a main effect of stimulus condition in an unexpected direction, as children gave more original responses in the low stimulus condition compared to the high stimulus condition. A significant moderation effect revealed that children with better selective attention skills benefitted from a low stimulus environment, whereas children with weaker selective attention performed better in a high stimulus environment. The findings demonstrate differential effects of the immediate situation and selective attention, and support the hypothesis that creativity is impacted by immediate situation and selective attention, yet in unexpected ways.
Highlights
Research into children’s creativity has had a strong focus on individual differences and how these relate to cognitive functions
Findings are not consistent across studies, as Kletke et al (2001) conclude in their review of studies on factors that support creativity and creative problem solving that the presence of stimuli in the immediate situation is related to higher fluency on creativity tasks
A possibly relevant child-internal factor that ties in with the situated view to creativity and that we further explored in our study, is selective attention
Summary
Research into children’s creativity has had a strong focus on individual differences and how these relate to cognitive functions. A few studies to date have addressed how children’s creative behaviour is influenced by characteristics of the situation in which this behaviour unfolds. Building on research indicating that creativity varies across situations 2010), the present study takes as a starting point the idea that creativity originates in individuals’. Acts of perceiving, thinking, and acting upon stimuli and that these acts vary across individuals, situations, and time (see Orth et al 2017 for a similar conception of creativity in creative motor action research). We hypothesise that children’s creativity depends on the array of stimuli present in the. Intell. 2020, 8, 37 immediate situation and their ability to attend selectively to stimulus features allowing them to discover uncommon uses of everyday objects
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