A new study suggests that creative thinking begins in infancy. Researchers found that infants as young as one year old can integrate simple concepts into complex ideas, suggesting that creativity begins in childhood.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Birmingham, led by Dr. Barbara Pomychowska, in the United Kingdom, and the Central European University, in Austria and Hungary, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 9, and was written about by the EurekAlert website.
Researchers have found that not only are children capable of creative thinking before they start speaking, but this type of thinking may be necessary for language acquisition.
In the study, the researchers set out to explore the origins of human creativity and innovative thinking to try to figure out how people come up with entirely new ideas and thoughts. The basic mechanism for doing this is to take familiar concepts and integrate them into new structures, but little is known about the extent to which these abilities can be used early in life.
The researchers found that the children were able to learn new words describing small quantities very quickly—an impressive feat—and automatically combine them with familiar words to fully understand the phrase.
“Human creativity has no limits: it has taken us to the moon and allowed us to cure deadly diseases – but despite its importance, we don’t yet know when and how this amazing ability to combine ideas and invent new things emerges,” said Dr Pomichowska.
Language acquisition
This research shows that we must go back to the beginning of language acquisition to solve this puzzle.
In this study, the researchers worked with a group of 60 infants, about 12 months old. They began by teaching the babies two new words that describe quantity: “mize,” meaning one, and “padu,” meaning two.
The children were then asked to combine these new number words with the names of different objects, for example to identify “duck” from a selection of pictures.
By teaching new words to represent quantities, the researchers were able to test the children’s ability to combine concepts, rather than simply remembering sets of words they already knew from previous experience.
By using eye-tracking technology to monitor where children were looking, the researchers were able to show that children could successfully combine the two concepts to understand what they were being asked about.
“For children, this ability to combine different concepts is likely to help them not only interpret complex language input, but also recognise different aspects of language,” said researcher Dr Agnes Kovacs, from the Department of Cognitive Sciences at Central European University and the Centre for Cognitive Development at Central European University.