Creative children are directed explorers

Hart, Kosoy, Liquin, Leonard, Mackey, Gopnik, Cognition 2022

Understanding how creative search evolves across development can provide critical insights into the mechanisms underlying creativity. Common beliefs about children's creativity are that they are more original than adults, that education ruins their creativity, and they are sometimes believed to be creative because they are more random in nature. Our study both supports and refutes these beliefs.

Using the "Creative Foraging Game" (CFG), we compared how children (ages 4–8) and adults explore a structured creative space. We found that compared to adults, children spend a higher percentage of their search exploring, and that their exploitation phases are less efficient. Interestingly, when adults turn right, children turn left as they orient their search to a different and smaller region of the search space. Within that space they produce more unique creative products. When compared to adults, children are more original, as the space they search in is different from where adults search. But compared to other children, they are less original which is a result of the more confined region that they search in. Using computational simulations we further showed that children's search is not random in nature but is more akin to a directed-exploration approach. Despite differences in their search characteristics, both groups share a fundamental search mechanism based on fold-change detection (FCD) which offers a scale invariant creative search. Last, as children grow up, their creative products become more adult-like and their uniqueness decreases.

These findings raise intriguing questions about the developmental trajectory of creative search. As children grow, their creative outputs gradually shift toward adult-like strategies, yet the parameters driving these shifts remain unclear. Identifying the parameters of the FCD search mechanism in children is a crucial next step. This work highlights the value of studying creative search as a window into the cognitive and developmental processes that underpin human creativity.