Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pjpqr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-24T10:07:47.581Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Creativity in Young Children's Thought

from SECTION ONE - CREATIVITY AND REASON IN CHILDHOOD AND THE SCHOOLS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

By
Susan A. Gelman  and
Gail M. Gottfried
Edited by
James C. Kaufman  and
John Baer
Susan A. Gelman
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Gail M. Gottfried
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
James C. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
John Baer
Affiliation:
Rider University, New Jersey
Get access

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 (Gottfried, unpublished data)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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development , pp. 9 - 32
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arias-Trejo, N., & Plunkett, K. (2010). The effects of perceptual similarity and category membership on early word-referent identification. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105(1–2), 63–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Astuti, R., Solomon, G. E. A., & Carey, S. (2004). Constraints on cognitive development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 69(3).Google Scholar
Bonawitz, E., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Goodman, N. D., Spelke, E., & Schulz, L. (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition, 120(3), 322–330.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Booth, A. E. (2014). Conceptually coherent categories support label-based inductive generalization in preschoolers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 123, 1–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brandone, A. C., Cimpian, A., Leslie, S., & Gelman, S. A. (2012). Do lions have manes? For children, generics are about kinds rather than quantities. Child Development, 83(2), 423–433.Google ScholarPubMed
Butler, L. P., & Markman, E. M. (2012). Preschoolers use intentional and pedagogical cues to guide inductive inferences and exploration. Child Development, 83(4), 1416–1428.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Callanan, M. A., & Oakes, L. M. (1992). Preschoolers’ questions and parents’ explanations: Causal thinking in everyday activity. Cognitive Development, 7, 213–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, G. N., & Pelletier, F. J. (Eds.) (1995). The generic book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chalik, L., Rivera, C., & Rhodes, M. (2014). Children's use of categories and mental states to predict social behavior. Developmental Psychology, 50(10), 2360–2367.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chouinard, M. M. (2007). Children's questions: A mechanism for cognitive development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 72(1).Google ScholarPubMed
Chukovsky, K. (1963). From 2 to 5. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A., & Markman, E. M. (2011). The generic/nongeneric distinction influences how children interpret new information about social others. Child Development, 82(2), 471–492.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cimpian, A., & Park, J. J. (2014). Tell me about Pangolins! Evidence that children are motivated to learn about kinds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 46–55.Google ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V. (1982). The young word-maker: A case study of innovation in the child's lexicon. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 390–425). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (2009). First language acquisition (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V., & Hecht, B. F. (1982). Learning to coin agent and instrument nouns. Cognition, 12, 1–24.CrossRef
Cook, C., Goodman, N. D., & Schulz, L. E. (2011). Where science starts: Spontaneous experiments in preschoolers’ exploratory play. Cognition, 120(3), 341–349.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crowley, K., Callanan, M. A., Jipson, J. L, Galco, J., Topping, K., & Shrager, J. (2001). Shared scientific thinking in everyday parent-child activity. Science Education, 85, 712–732.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewar, K., & Xu, F. (2009). Do early nouns refer to kinds or distinct shapes? Evidence from 10-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 20(2), 252–257.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frazier, B. N., Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (2009). Preschoolers’ search for explanatory information within adult-child conversation. Child Development, 80 (6), 1592–1611.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friedman, O., Neary, K. R., Burnstein, C. L., & Leslie, A. M. (2010). Is young children's recognition of pretense metarepresentational or merely behavioral? Evidence from 2- and 3-year-olds’ understanding of pretend sounds and speech. Cognition, 115(2), 314–319.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, R. & Baillargeon, R. (1983). A review of some Piagetian concepts. In Flavell, J. H. and Markman, E. (Eds.), Cognitive development, Vol. 3. Handbook of child development (pp. 167–230). New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2009). Learning from others: Children's construction of concepts. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 115–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, S. A., Croft, W., Fu, P., Clausner, T., & Gottfried, G. M. (1998). The role of shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge in children's overextensions. Journal of Child Language, 25, 267–293.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., & Davidson, N. S. (2013). Conceptual influences on category-based induction. Cognitive Psychology, 66(3), 327–353.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., Goetz, P. J., Sarnecka, B. W., & Flukes, J. (2008). Generic language in parent-child conversations. Language Learning and Development, 4(1), 1–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., & Gottfried, G. M. (1996). Children's causal explanations for animate and inanimate motion. Child Development, 67, 1970–1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, S. A., & Markman, E. M. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition, 23, 183–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., Taylor, M. G., Nguyen, S. P. (2004). Mother-child conversations about gender: Understanding the acquisition of essentialist beliefs. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, i–142.
Gelman, S. A., Ware, E., & Kleinberg, F. (2010). Effects of generic language on category content and structure. Cognitive Psychology, 61, 273–301.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M., (1991). Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition, 38, 213–244.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Giles, J. W. (2003). Children's essentialist beliefs about aggression. Developmental Review, 23, 413–443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, N. (1954). Fact, fiction, and forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gottfried, G.M. (1991). Preschoolers’ “metaphoric” language: Intentional violation of established taxonomic category or undifferentiated similarity? Master's thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Gelman, S. A. (1997). Using metaphors as modifiers: Metaphoric compounds in preschoolers’ speech. Journal of Child Language, 24, 567–601.Google Scholar
Gottfried, G., & Gelman, S. A. (2005). Developing domain-specific causal- explanatory frameworks: The role of insides and immanence. Cognitive Development 14(1), 147–174.Google Scholar
Gottfried, G. M., Hickling, A. K., Totten, L. R., Mkroyan, A., & Reisz, A. (2003). To be or not to be a galaprock: Preschoolers’ intuitions about the importance of knowledge and action for pretending. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 21, 397–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, S. A., Kilbreath, C. S., & Welder, A. N. (2004). Thirteen-month-olds rely on shared labels and shape similarity for inductive inferences. Child Development, 75, 409–427.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harris, P. L., & Koenig, M. A. (2006). Trust in testimony: How children learn about science and religion. Child Development, 77(3), 505–524.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heit, E., & Hayes, B. K. (2005). Relations among categorization, induction, recognition, and similarity: Comment on Sloutsky and Fisher (2004). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(4), 596–605.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heyman, G., & Gelman, S. A. (2000). Preschool children's use of trait labels to make inductive inferences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77, 1–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hickling, A. K., & Wellman, H. M. (2001). The emergence of children's causal explanations and theories: Evidence from everyday conversation. Developmental Psychology, 37, 668–683.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hickling, A. K., Wellman, H. M., & Gottfried, G. M. (1997). Conceptualizing pretense as pretense: Early understanding of others’ mental attitudes toward pretend happenings. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 339–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschfeld, L. A. (2005). Children's understanding of racial groups. In Barrett, M. and Buchanan-Barrow, E. (Eds.), Children's understanding of society (pp. 199–222). New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, L. A., & Gelman, S. A. (1997). What young children think about the relation between language variation and social difference. Cognitive Development, 12, 213–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaswal, V. K., & Markman, E. M. (2007). Looks aren't everything: 24-month-olds’ willingness to accept unexpected labels. Journal of Cognition and Development, 8(1), 93–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, S., Kalish, C. W., & Harris, P. L. (2012). Speaker reliability guides children's inductive inferences about novel properties. Cognitive Development, 27(2), 114–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinzler, K. D., & Dautel, J. B. (2012). Children's essentialist reasoning about language and race. Developmental Science, 15(1), 131–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, D. (2011). What is scientific thinking and how does it develop? In Goswami, U. (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development (2nd ed., pp. 497–523). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Legare, C. H. (2012). Exploring explanation: Explaining inconsistent evidence informs exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior in young children. Child Development, 83(1), 173–185.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lillard, A. S. (1998). Wanting to be it: Children's understanding of intentions underlying pretense. Child Development, 69, 981–993.Google ScholarPubMed
Lillard, A. S., Lerner, M. D., Hopkins, E. J., Dore, R. A., Smith, E. D., & Palmquist, C. M. (2013). The impact of pretend play on children's development: A review of the evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lord, C., Rutter, M., DiLavore, P. C., & Risi, S. (1999). The autism diagnostic observation schedule: Generic. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M., & Hutchinson, J. E. (1984). Children's sensitivity to constraints on word meaning: Taxonomic versus thematic relations. Cognitive Psychology, 16, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medin, D. L., Coley, J. D., Storms, G., & Hayes, B. K. (2003). A relevance theory of induction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 517–532.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mottweiler, C. M., & Taylor, M. (2014). Elaborated role play and creativity in preschool age children. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8(3), 277–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naigles, L. R., Kelley, E., Troyb, E., & Fein, D. (2013). Residual difficulties with categorical induction in children with a history of autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43(9), 2048–2061.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newman, G. E., Herrmann, P., Wynn, K., & Keil, F. C. (2008). Biases towards internal features in infants’ reasoning about objects. Cognition, 107(2), 420–432.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Reilly, A. W. (1995). Using representations: Comprehension and production of actions with imagined objects. Child Development, 66(4), 999–1010.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Persicke, A., Tarbox, J., Ranick, J., & St. Clair, M. (2012). Establishing metaphorical reasoning in children with autism. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 6(2), 913–920.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prasada, S. (2000). Acquiring generic knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 66–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S., & Tworek, C. M. (2012). Cultural transmission of social essentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 109(34), 13526–13531.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Richert, R., & Lillard, A. S. (2004). Observers’ proficiency at identifying pretense acts based on behavioral cues. Cognitive Development, 19, 223–240.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, F. J. (2013). The development of imagination in children with autism. In Taylor, M. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the development of imagination (pp. 499–515). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Setoh, P., Wu, D., Baillargeon, R., & Gelman, R. (2013). Young infants have biological expectations about animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 110(40), 15937–15942.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shatz, M. (1994). A toddler's life: Becoming a person. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M. (2003). The role of similarity in the development of categorization. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 246–251.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Solomon, G. E. A. (2002). Birth, kind and naïve biology. Developmental Science, 5, 213–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tadmor, C. T., Chao, M. M., Hong, Y., & Polzer, J. T. (2013). Not just for stereotyping anymore: Racial essentialism reduces domain-general creativity. Psychological Science, 24(1), 99–105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tare, M., French, J., Frazier, B. N., Diamond, J., & Evans, E. (2011). Explanatory parent–child conversation predominates at an evolution exhibit. Science Education, 95(4), 720–744.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, M. (1999). Imaginary companions and the children who create them. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, M., Sachet, A. B., Maring, B. L., & Mannering, A. M. (2013). The assessment of elaborated role–play in young children: Invisible friends, personified objects, and pretend identities. Social Development, 22(1), 75–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, M. G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S. A. (2009). Boys will be boys; Cows will be cows: Children's essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development, 80(2), 461–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Striano, T., & Rochat, P. (1999). Do young children use objects as symbols? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 17(4), 563–584.CrossRef
Vosniadou, S., & Ortony, A. (1983). The emergence of the literal- metaphorical-anomalous distinction in young children. Child Development, 54, 154–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wałaszewska, E. (2011). Broadening and narrowing in lexical development: How relevance theory can account for children's overextensions and underextensions. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(1), 314–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, T. B., & Wickes, K. S. (2009). Stable and dynamic properties of category structure guide imaginative thought. Creativity Research Journal, 21(1), 15–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ware, E. A., Gelman, S. A., & Kleinberg, F. (2013). The medium is the message: Pictures and objects evoke distinct conceptual relations in parent-child conversations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 59(1), 50–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Waxman, S. R., & Gelman, S. A. (2009). Early word-learning entails reference, not merely associations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(6), 258–263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waxman, S. R., (2010). Different kinds of concepts and different kinds of words: What words do for human cognition. In Mareschal, D., Quinn, P. C., Lea, S. G. (Eds.), The making of human concepts (pp. 99–129). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Waxman, S., Medin, D., & Ross, N. (2007). Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective: Early essentialist notions are shaped by cultural beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 43(2), 294–308.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weisberg, D. S., & Gopnik, A. (2013). Pretense, counterfactuals, and Bayesian causal models: Why what is not real really matters. Cognitive Science, 37(7), 1368–1381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wellman, H. M., & Gelman, S. A. (1998). Knowledge acquisition in foundational domains. In Damon, W. (Editor-in-chief), Kuhn, D., & Siegler, R. (Eds.) Handbook of child psychology (5th ed.), Vol. 2: Cognition, perception, and language (pp. 523–573). New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Winner, E. (1979). New names for old things: The emergence of metaphoric language. Journal of Child Language, 6, 469–491.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Winner, E., McCarthy, M., Kleinman, S., & Gardner, H. (1979). First metaphors. In Wolf, D. & Gardner, H. (Eds.), Early symbolization: New directions for child development (Vol. 3, pp. 29–41). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Yamauchi, T. (2005). Labeling bias and categorical induction: Generative aspects of category information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(3), 538–553.Google ScholarPubMed

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×