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2006 results in Cognitive Psychology

Page 17 of 101

  • 4 - Mental action: attention and consciousness

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 69-99

  • Summary

    People like to look for things. From Where's Waldo? to countless video games, searching for visual targets is considered by many people to be fun. Paleontologists hunt for dinosaur bones, anthropologists hunt for human bones, and archeologists hunt for the debris of ancient civilizations. Quarterbacks search for the open receiver and point guards search for the open shooter. Merchants stock miles of shelves in giant stores with confidence that customers will be able to find what they look for. People can routinely detect and respond to task relevant targets so quickly that they can drive vehicles through crowded streets safely much more quickly than any person can walk or run. The general name for this ability to control perception so that what is important is seen or heard is attention.

    Attention refers to voluntary actions that are used to control perception. Seeing and hearing are the consequence of looking and listening. The control of perception involves either of two tasks. One task is to select a single target for processing, such as when you listen to a single conversation during a party. The other task is to divide attention among several targets, such as when you drive a car down a crowded street. In this chapter we will see the following.

  • • Selective attention involves three stages: target specification, search, and target identification. The frontal cortex, where the target is specified, selects for the target by the inhibition of all perceptual input that is not target-related.

  • • Because the human information-processing system can plan and perform only one ad hoc voluntary response at a time, the bottleneck imposed by serial responding limits the number of targets that can be identified and responded to. Tasks that require independent ad hoc responses to multiple targets are called divided attention tasks. Divided attention inevitably results in missed targets and lower responses. Multitasking results in poorer performance than performing the tasks separately.

  • • Target selection is not entirely determined by top-down control from the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex. Emotional arousal may also play a role. Emotional arousal increases the inhibition of distracters, narrowing perceptual processing to just the emotionally significant target. In other words, one cannot ignore something sufficiently threatening.

    • About attention

    People do not passively see and hear but actively look and listen. The same neural systems that evolved to control motor movements control perception as well.

  • 2 - The evolution of cognition

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 20-40

  • Summary

    Automatic responses play only a limited role in our behavior because life is not perfectly predictable. If a lifetime of events was perfectly predictable then every animal could be born able to automatically make every response it would ever need to make, and cognition would be unnecessary. However, life is not perfectly predictable. To make it possible to respond to unpredicted challenges in the world, an elaborated nervous system evolved that made voluntary action possible. The advantage of voluntary over automatic, involuntary action is that it can be ad hoc. Faced with something unexpected, an animal can craft a response it has never made before. Social creatures face a lifetime of new social experiences that require ad hoc responses. For example, dogs that are allowed on furniture often sit where other family members sit. This is how I came to share a chair with my golden retriever. The dog would have to move whenever I wanted to sit down. Across the room was the sliding door to the backyard. The retriever learned that, to go out, he should touch the door. One day, when I was sitting in the chair, the dog touched the door. I got up and walked over to the door. Before I could open it, the dog ran back and sat in the chair!

    Cognition begins with the control of voluntary action. In this chapter we will see that cognition evolved to make it possible for an animal to perform novel actions in response to novel, hence unexpected, events.

  • • To make voluntary action possible, at the top of the spinal cord, layer upon layer of representational, computational, and control structure was added, forming brains of increasing complexity, which provided increasingly sophisticated control of voluntary action. The great advantage of a voluntary ad hoc system of action is that it can craft new responses to novel situations, and so respond to change. The great advantage of learning is that successful new actions can be incorporated into future behaviors.

  • • Voluntary action is synonymous with consciousness. The control of voluntary action is synonymous with cognition.

  • • Social groups are so effective at dominating their environments that a member's success at raising a family depends more on his or her social standing than any other factor. […]

  • 12 - Recall

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 312-336

  • Summary

    Before we went to Paris, I suggested to my eight-year-old son that it would be fun to walk to the top of the Eiffel Tower. At first he was dubious, but when we got there he embraced the task with great enthusiasm. Soon he was bounding up the stairs at rapid clip, and we reached the top far in advance of the rest of our party, who waited for the elevator. Very much pleased with myself, when we returned home I asked him what he enjoyed most about the trip to Paris. He answered, unhesitatingly, “The Empire State Building.”

    Clearly, this was a retrieval error. It demonstrates that encoding the representation of an object or event is not sufficient to ensure an accurate memory later on. A recall task requires you to respond with information not in the question – for example, what you enjoyed best on your trip to Paris. In a recall task, the cue may be distinguished from the target response it elicits. In a question-and-answer format, the question is the cue, and the answer is the target of the recollection. In a navigation task, the goal is the cue, the location of the goal is the target, and the mental map containing the sequence of movements to the goal is the recollection.

    Recall frees human thought and action from the constraints of the immediate environment. Recognition makes it possible to respond to whatever is immediately at hand (Chapter 10). However, self-cuing makes it possible to recall, hence think about, anything one has experienced.

  • 18 - An Update on “Does Culture Always Matter”: For Creativity, Yes, for Deductive Reasoning, No!

  • from SECTION THREE - CREATIVITY AND REASON: INTERACTIONS AND RELATED CONSTRUCTS
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 354-378

  • Summary

    The work of Nisbett, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan (2001) on culture and systems of thought has drawn much attention from psychologists. The authors presented a strong and provocative view of cultural influence on human cognition. According to Nisbett et al., culture can influence not only our belief systems, languages, and social cognitive systems, but also the very basic cognitive processes of how we perceive and think. Their paper reviewed studies showing how culture penetrated almost every aspect of our cognitive processing, such as focus of attention, cognitive control, knowledge acquisition, attribution, prediction and “post-diction” (ad hoc explanation), reasoning, cognitive styles, categorization, judgment, and problem solving.

    Is the influence of culture on cognition as pervasive as Nisbett et al. suggested? In this chapter, we examine the extent of cultural influence on human thinking by focusing on two types of thinking: deductive reasoning and creativity, which are both fundamental human abilities but are commonly considered different cognitive processes.

    To many psychologists, deductive reasoning and creativity are like two antitheses, representing two modes of thinking (e.g., de Bono, 1991; Johnson-Laird, 1987, 1993; Lavric, Forstmeier, & Rippon, 2000; Runco, 2002; Sternberg & O'Hara, 1999). Johnson-Laird (1987) once stated that the cognitive process of human creativity was beyond a scientific explanation, and certainly different from that of logical reasoning. De Bono (1991), who invented the terms vertical and lateral thinking, roughly paralleling the contrast between analytical and creative thinking, made clear distinctions between these two modes of thinking. According to de Bono, while vertical thinking proceeds along well-established patterns, follows a closed procedure, and promises a minimal result, lateral thinking seeks to avoid the obvious, has open-ended maximum solutions, and promises no single correct result.

    Sternberg (1997a, 2012), in his successful intelligence theory, advocated that there were three aspects of intelligence: analytical, creative, and practical. Those three aspects can be independent from each other, such that a person strong in one aspect may not be necessarily strong in the other two.

    As an important factor in individual differences, culture stands out as a crucial next step to be examined. A significant number of studies to date have explored cultural influence on deductive reasoning and creativity, but most focused on just one cognitive process. As critical as this topic is, the existing evidence is far from adequate. Therefore cultural influence on these two important modes of thinking deserves more attention.

  • 12 - Creative Genius, Knowledge, and Reason: The Lives and Works of Eminent Creators

  • from SECTION TWO - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 226-245

  • Summary

    Many creative geniuses attain reputations of almost mythical proportions. Apparently gifted with a special insight or intuitive power, creative ideas are supposed to pop into their heads in flashes of inspiration. In earlier times, this almost mystical process would be attributed to divine intervention, as is evident in the Greek doctrine of the Muses. Even during the Renaissance the greatest artist of the period would be called the “divine Michelangelo,” an artistic genius who, according to his biographer Vasari, was sent to earth by God to bless the world with his talent. Centuries later, when such religious attributions were no longer fashionable, creative genius would become linked with madness. This linkage became especially prominent during the Romantic Era of nineteenth-century Europe. A well-known illustration is to be found in the Preface to “Kubla Khan” in which the poet Coleridge claimed to have conceived his poem in an opium-induced stupor. Eventually psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and even psychologists were joining the chorus, associating creative genius with insanity and even criminality. The consensus seemed to be that creative geniuses were not like normal human beings. They had thought processes and personalities that set them apart from other members of the species.

    Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century a shift was taking place. Creative genius was not so special after all. This change first was apparent in attitudes toward scientific creativity. According to the emerging discipline known as the philosophy of science, scientific discovery was the product of the scientific method, a system of thinking identified with hypothetico-deductive reasoning or some other analytical technique. All scientists who acquire this approach can engage in scientific creativity, regardless of their personal qualities or gifts. For instance, the philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1932/1957) maintained that “it is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success” (pp. 110–111).

    This statement implies that creative genius has become largely irrelevant in modern science. This seemingly extreme claim has received endorsement in a whole school of research devoted to the psychology of science (Simonton, 2003a).

  • 13 - Attention, Cognitive Flexibility, and Creativity: Insights from the Brain

  • from SECTION TWO - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 246-258

  • Summary

    As an emerging area of research, the neuroscience of creativity has made significant strides over the last decade by beginning to elucidate the brain bases of creative cognition (Vartanian, Bristol, & Kaufman, 2013). Among researchers and practitioners of creativity, the contributions of this new area are deemed valuable to the extent that they shed light on the key mechanisms and processes that underlie creativity. In this sense, rather than merely confirming what is already known about creativity using a new set of metrics, the true worth of neuroscientific data will involve the quality of the tools and ideas it offers for testing the “joints in the system” (Goel, 2005, p. 268; see also Shallice, 1988). In turn, as better mechanistic accounts of brain function in relation to creativity emerge, neuroscientifically informed interventions to facilitate this mode of thinking in educational, professional, and applied settings can be developed.

    As noted by Goel (2005) in relation to another high-order process – reasoning – the contribution neuroscience can make to our understanding of cognition includes but also extends beyond elucidating mechanisms. Specifically, and more immediately, neuroscientific data have been a great source of knowledge regarding dissociation of cognitive functions. For example, Miller and Tippet (1996) administered Guilford's (1967) classic Match Problems task to patients with focal brain lesions and normal controls. Critically, two types of problems were administered to the participants: one set of problems involved straightforward match removal for solution, whereas another set of problems required “set shifting” to arrive at correct solutions. In the problem solving literature a set shift is defined as the ability to overcome the conceptual and/or perceptual constraints that define the problem space. Set shift problems are typically measured using perseverative errors in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (Grant & Berg, 1948), given that they demonstrate the participant's inability to revise the card sorting strategy following a rule change. Miller and Tippett (1996) reported that patients with focal right prefrontal cortex (PFC) lesions were impaired specifically on those match problems that required set shifts, but not otherwise. In addition, this selective impairment in performance on set-shift problems was especially apparent in patients with lesions to right ventral (as opposed to dorsal) PFC. Importantly, no such selective impairment on set-shift problems was observed in patients with temporal-occipital, parietal, central, or left frontal lesions.

  • 11 - Creativity and Constraint: Friends, Not Foes

  • from SECTION TWO - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 211-225

  • Summary

    The complex and sometimes elusive concept of creativity has inspired many creative approaches to its study. Despite competing accounts and progressively more methodical empirical scrutiny, creativity still seems surrounded by a fuzzy aura of ambiguity. Its very definition remains open to debate, and many other related issues risk to be buried under a similar state of inconclusiveness: Is creativity domain-specific or not (Ambrose, 2009; Baer, 1998, 2011, 2012; Silva, Kaufman, & Pertz, 2009)? Does it refer to a process, a set of aptitudes, or the resulting product? How is creativity assessed (e.g., Kaufman & Baer, 2012)? Is creativity restricted to only a few geniuses, or does creative potential exist in everyone? Does gender (e.g., Baer, 1997) or mental illness 2001 play a role (e.g., Kaufman, 2001)? Is creativity important (Kaufman, Davis, & Beghetto, 2012; Runco & Abdullah, 2014; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995)? If so, how does one best study it (Ambrose, 2006; Ambrose, Sriraman, & Pierce, 2014)? From a neuroimaging perspective (see Arden, Chavez, Grazioplene, & Jung, 2010 for an overview), how does creative thought develop in the brain, and where?

    One of the less debated claims is that creativity can and does manifest itself in virtually all areas of human life. Creative instances range from a moving piano sonata to an original fashion show, from a major scientific breakthrough to witty dialogue in a novel, from an innovative business initiative to an inspired soccer game. Indeed, the adjective creative can precede a vast number of nouns: a creative experiment, creative architecture, a creative poem, creative landscaping.

    Although creativity is often extolled in domains such as music, painting, and literature, few of us would readily associate it with more mundane tasks, such as making dinner or writing a note for someone's birthday. Why are we generally reluctant to apply the label creative to the production of an original meal or a sentence? The reason is a widespread intuition that “true” creativity must bring about, via its outcome, some major change or important contribution in an acknowledged field. For example, Sternberg, Kaufman, and Pretz (2002) put forth a Propulsion Theory of Creative Contributions to describe the processes by which a creative act can impact an entire field. Boden (1990) discussed this difference between two types of creativity: psychological (P-creativity) and historic (H-creativity).

  • 4 - Imaginative Play

  • from SECTION ONE - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN CHILDHOOD AND THE SCHOOLS
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 52-71

  • Summary

    Pretend play is a perfect vehicle for developing imagination in children. Pretend play involves self-generated manipulation of components of imagination. When playing, children manipulate mental representations, imagery, and memories and act them out. Many of these mental components are associated with emotion. Emotion-laden cognition, fantasies, and scripts are played out in a pretend world. The child creates new scripts, fuses images and memories, and generates new ideas. All of these mental events are important in creativity. Theoretically, these manipulations of components of imagination within pretend play should set the stage for creative thought. Pretend play helps children develop creative capacities. This chapter reviews theoretical approaches to imaginative play and creativity, research evidence, and neurological findings and theory that have implications for the development of imagination in play.

    Pretend Play, Imagination, and Creativity

    Pretend play is a symbolic behavior in which “one thing is playfully treated ‘as if’ it were something else” (Fein, 1987, p. 282). Fein (1987) also stressed the importance of affect expression in pretend play – cognitive and affective processes are intertwined in pretend play expressions. Singer and Singer (2013) have long proposed that pretend play serves as a “critical precursor” (p. 11) for the development of forming experiences into narratives, for guiding thought processes, and for noticing the content of one's stream of consciousness. Because so many of the cognitive and affective processes in pretend play are also involved in creative expression, pretend play is thought to be a precursor of creativity (Fein, 1987; Singer & Singer, 1990; Russ, 1993, 2014).

    Russ (1993; 2014), based on both clinical and research literatures, articulated cognitive and affective processes that occur in imaginative pretend play. Cognitive processes involved in play include organization of narratives, symbolism, divergent thinking, fantasy/make-believe, and recombining and manipulating images and story events. A child demonstrates organization and imagination when he or she is able to tell a coherent story with fantasy sequences. Divergent thinking is a child's ability to create a multitude of different ideas that are not confined to conventional ways of thinking or problem solving and to use objects to represent different things, such as when a stick is used as a birthday candle. Fantasy/make-believe refers to a child's ability to pretend that he or she is in a different place or time and role play with various objects and other people.

  • 16 - Creative Self-Beliefs: Their Nature, Development, and Correlates

  • from SECTION THREE - CREATIVITY AND REASON: INTERACTIONS AND RELATED CONSTRUCTS
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 302-326

  • Summary

    People's convictions about their own abilities and psychological characteristics are of crucial significance in regard to their actual functioning, including creativity. Historically, self-beliefs (which include aspects of self-efficacy, self-concept, and self-esteem) have most frequently been conceptualized from two different perspectives in psychology: (1) humanistic and neo-humanistic positive psychology and (2) cognitive and social-cognitive psychology. The first approach is strongly grounded in the works of Maslow (1958), Rogers (1954), and Fromm (1959) and was continued by Csikszentmihalyi (1997) and others (e.g., Richards, 2010). This approach often conceptualizes the formation of identity as a creative process, or, reciprocally, posits that creativity represents a mechanism of self-understanding, self-fulfillment, or self-actualization. The second approach, which encompasses Bandura's (1997) classic work, considers the process of acquiring knowledge about one's self as an activity that is largely cognitive and is conditioned by interactions with the social world. Other established approaches include educational perspectives focusing on the structure of self-concepts (e.g., Marsh, 1990), developmental approaches (Eccles, 1983), and cultural psychology approaches within the field of creativity (Glăveanu & Tanggaard, 2014).

    The present chapter reviews and summarizes key data about the role and significance of self-beliefs about one's creativity (creative self-beliefs [CSB]), with a focus on the sociocognitive approach. Specifically, the purpose of this chapter is to articulate theories and research on CSB, and to outline possible relationships that may exist between a wide and heterogeneous range of facets of both CSB and creativity. We focus our review principally on little-c and mini-c creativity in children and adolescents, rather than on professional (Pro-C) or eminent (Big-C) creativity (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). Indeed, the significance of self-beliefs for “everyday” creativity (e.g., a child's creative thinking, solving everyday problems, tackling issues that require individual inventions) is truly intriguing: to what extent do children's, adolescents’, and adults’ convictions about their creative abilities influence their motivation to undertake creative activities? How are CSBs formed? How can CSBs be strengthened and why should they be supported? This chapter addresses these questions, among others.

    Although we focus on everyday creativity, it is worth noting that eminent creativity may also suggest and inform inquiries about CSBs. For example, eminent individuals tend to be strongly convinced about their own creative abilities (Barron & Harrington, 1981), as a result of their successes and the feedback they obtain from their fields.

  • 15 - Creativity and Reason: Friends or Foes?

  • from SECTION THREE - CREATIVITY AND REASON: INTERACTIONS AND RELATED CONSTRUCTS
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 282-301

  • Summary

    We here explore possible links between reasoning and creativity. Creativity has sometimes been described as a blind search with retention of fortuitous “good” ideas, as a “freewheeling” mental activity, as “thinking outside the box” and as the result of “primary processes” that are intuitive. Creativity is often contrasted with adaptive step-by-step processing, controlled thought, logic and prototypical “reasoning” behavior. However, is this dichotomy a reasonable picture of the way things work, or rather a caricature that hides some deep links between reasoning and creativity? First, the relationship between the development of logical thought and creative thinking in children is examined. Then connections between creativity and formal and postformal reasoning, in particular dialectical thinking, are studied. Finally, implications and conclusions are drawn.

    In this chapter, we consider reasoning, in general, as the act of thinking based on inductive and deductive processes. It is often associated, more specifically, with the process of developing and supporting assertions, claims, proposals or conclusions from facts or premises, based on a set of arguments (Reber, 1995). Reasoning, in many cases, provides the basis for action or decisions. The development of reasoning is often viewed as an important educational goal.

    Creativity, in contrast, can be defined as the capacity to produce novel, original work that fits with task constraints (Lubart, 1994). Work refers to all types of ideas and productions. This work must be novel in the sense that it goes beyond a replication or copy of that which exists. The extent to which the work produced is novel can vary from being original only for the person who completed the work (this is the notion of reinventing ideas known already in the larger social context) to being original for a limited social group, to being original for all of humanity. The second component in the definition concerns the fit with constraints. We distinguish creative ideas from bizarre ideas, which are also novel, because creative ideas take into account the parameters of a situation, the constraints. Novel productions that are in some way “useful”, or “worthwhile”, in a given context are, thus, creative.

    In the following sections the links between reasoning and creativity are examined.

  • 9 - Processes, Strategies, and Knowledge in Creative Thought: Multiple Interacting Systems

  • from SECTION TWO - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 164-186

  • Summary

    To a naïve person, creativity looks to be a lot of fun. You get to make up something new – something that might, in fact, change the world. However, the evidence we have gathered in recent years suggests that for those actually doing creative work, although it may be fun, it is also challenging. Most creative efforts fail (Huber, 1998). Creative people look to the past and, potentially, past failures (Antes & Mumford, 2009). Criticism, including self-criticism, appears critical to the success of creative efforts (Cropley, 2006; Gibson & Mumford, 2013). Creative people must worry about constraints on their solutions (Medeiros, Partlow, & Mumford, 2015) and the acceptance of their ideas by others (Rubenson & Runco, 1992).

    Although many factors contribute to the difficulty of creative work, the fundamental nature of creative thought may also play an important role. Ultimately, creativity is a complex form of performance involving the production of solutions of high quality, originality, and elegance (Besemer & O'Quin, 1993; Christiaans, 2002) to problems that are complex, novel, ill defined, and poorly structured (Mumford & Gustafson, 1988, 2012). It is commonly held that the production of these problem solutions depends on three key cognitive capacities: (1) knowledge, (2) strategies used in working with this knowledge, and (3) the processes these strategies are being used to execute. Each of these components of creative thought has been studied in isolation. For example, Finke, Ward, and Smith (1992) have studied the impact of knowledge on creative problem solving. Mumford et al. (1997) have studied the impact of processing activities on creative problem-solving. The impact of both cross-process strategies, such as divergent thinking, and process-specific strategies, such as feature search and mapping, on creative problem solving has been examined in studies by Acar and Runco (2012) and Baughman and Mumford (1995).

    This research has begun to provide us with a sounder and stronger understanding of the nature of creative thought. By the same token, the difficulty of creative work may lie not only in the difficulty of executing each of these discrete cognitive operations, but also in the nature of the interactions observed among these cognitive capacities as people seek to generate creative problem solutions. In this chapter, we examine some of the interactions likely to be observed among knowledge, processes, and strategies as people seek to generate creative problem solutions.

  • 2 - Creativity in Young Children's Thought

  • from SECTION ONE - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN CHILDHOOD AND THE SCHOOLS
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 9-32

  • Summary

    Consider the following examples:

    1. • Adam (age two and a half) was taking a bath, and his mother said, “I'm going to get the shampoo” as she reached for the bottle of shampoo, which had a cap in the form of Winnie-the-Pooh's head. Adam replied, without missing a beat, “I want sham-piglet,” pointing at the bottle of bath bubbles, which had a cap in the form of Piglet's head. (Gelman, 2003, p. viii)

    2. • A conversation between a child (age two years) and her father:

    3. sharon: “I pretend the sand is a birthday cake!”

    4. father: “The sand is a birthday cake?”

    5. sharon: “I preTEND.” (Gottfried, unpublished data)

    6. • “The water is the fish's house.” (Sophie, age three years; we thank Sophie's father, Andrew Gelman, for supplying this example)

    7. • “Do animals like pomegranates?” (Abe, age two years, 11 months; Gelman, 2003, p. 205)

    Although this chapter concerns creativity, we do not consider ourselves to be “creativity researchers” – that is, we do not study creativity per se. Rather, we are developmental psychologists who study children's concepts. However, we argue in this chapter that young children's ordinary thought entails a considerable degree of creativity. Specifically, children organize knowledge in creative ways, from a very young age. Our main goal is to make this case with four key illustrations (paralleling the preceding examples), including (1) nonconventional language use, (2) pretense, (3) theory construction, and (4) generalizing from specifics. Although some of these cases will be familiar to those who study creativity (e.g., nonliteral language use and pretense are prototypical examples of creativity in children and are linked to creative endeavors for adults, such as poetry or theater), others are not so readily understood as displaying creativity. So part of our task is to explain why and how we consider these commonplace cognitive activities to be embedded in a creative approach to knowledge. Additionally, we hope to raise some more general questions concerning what counts as creativity, the developmental fate of creativity, and the relation between creativity and cognition more broadly.

    First, a note on what we mean by “young children.” Our focus is on children who can talk but have not yet begun formal schooling, primarily two- to five-year-olds. This age group is of particular interest for several reasons.

  • 3 - Early Experiences and Creativity: An Ecological Perspective

  • from SECTION ONE - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN CHILDHOOD AND THE SCHOOLS
  • Edited by James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut, John Baer, Rider University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development
    Published online:
    05 February 2016
    Print publication:
    15 February 2016, pp 33-51

  • Summary

    Diane's art studio is located at the center of a school building that houses a diverse population of children from four years old through eighth grade. The studio is physically and philosophically central to the work that takes place in the building yet intentionally designed as a space apart. When Diane meets with children before their first visit to the studio, she starts the process of defining what is different there and what is possible there and welcomes them into a context and culture that nurtures, honors, and supports the creative process. From that point forward, each time children approach the door to the studio, she quietly asks them to pause and think about this question: Are you ready to be artists? This moment of focus marks the physical and psychological boundary between this space and many others in a child's life.

    The space communicates this clearly to children. Materials and tools are arranged to stimulate eyes and mind and are accessible to the children. “Is all this stuff for kids to use?” some will ask. Yes, children's planning, doing and meaning-making happen here.

    Shelves with work-in-progress are clearly visible. Thinking and doing are not time bound by class periods. Children have time for finding and re-finding the intention of their work and defining and redefining problems encountered as Diane introduces new information, new strategies and new ways of thinking. Children critique their work against their initial intentions and practice decision making as they determine when a piece of work is complete.

    “Is there really a rabbit in here?” Claude Monet, the studio rabbit, does indeed live here and moves around the studio freely while the children work. He plays a critical role in creating and maintaining a climate of calm and focus and where all children, all work, and a rabbit are respected and safe.

    Each time children enter the studio, knowledge about themselves and their worlds and flexible, generative, and critical thinking not only coexist but also thrive and grow here. “This place is different.”

    As we consider the development of creativity and the acquisition of knowledge and analytic skills in early childhood we do so from an ecological perspective. Simply put, context matters. A child develops within interacting environmental systems made up of particular individuals and communities within institutions and overarching societal norms.

Page 17 of 101