Psychologists have devised a test for measuring one-year-olds’ creativity

A team of psychologists in England say they've developed a reliable way to measure divergent thinking in one-year-old infants. Divergent thinking is a form of creativity that involves uncovering new ideas or ways of doing things. The finding published in Child Development opens up the possibility of exploring the early factors that lead one infant to be more creative than another, and potentially intervening to help foster creativity extremely early in a child's life.

Elena Hoicka and her colleagues filmed 29 toddlers (average age of 19 months) as they played freely on their own with a specially designed box that was paired for 90 seconds at a time with one of five unusual objects, including a wire egg cup and a plastic hook.

Later, researchers watched back the videos and counted how many unique actions each child performed with each object. To be counted as a new action, the child had to do something different with the object, or perform the same action with the object but on a different part of the box. The box featured various compartments, steps, shelves, holes and strings, offering a multitude of ways to play. The greater the number of different actions that the toddlers performed with the objects and box, the higher the divergent thinking score they received.

The researchers found that there was a wide spread of scores on the test showing its ability to differentiate between children. What's more, when the same toddlers performed the test two weeks' later, they tended to achieve very similar scores second time around. In psychological jargon, this is a sign of "test/re-test reliability", which suggests the test is measuring a persistent trait of divergent thinking, rather than the influence of momentary factors such as mood or fatigue. Also, most toddler actions performed during the second test were new, so it wasn't just that higher scoring toddlers were remembering their actions from the first session.

Another aspect of the study was that the researchers asked each toddler's mother or father to complete an adult test of divergent thinking that involved completing partially drawn images in imaginative ways. The parents' creativity scores showed a moderate to high correlation with their toddlers' scores. This could be because creativity is partly inherited through genes, or it could be due to toddlers learning from their parents' creativity. Another intriguing possibility raised by the researchers is that creative toddlers may influence their parents' creativity. "It is possible," they write," that if a parent has a child who tends to explore, parents may be influenced by this and also explore more".

Further reading

Hoicka, E., Mowat, R., Kirkwood, J., Kerr, T., Carberry, M., & Bijvoet-van den Berg, S. (2016). One-Year-Olds Think Creatively, Just Like Their Parents Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12531

Pre-schoolers can tell abstract expressionist art from similar works by children and animals