Research context:
This research is part of the Master 2 PEADID directed by Mr. Jacques-Henri Guignard and Mr. Pierre Martin. The aim of this research is to study the link between creativity and executive functions in children.
Interest in creativity is based on the fact that the younger generations will increasingly have to be creative in order to adapt to the world of tomorrow (Dumont & Istance, 2010). In particular, schools have a real role to play in the development of schoolchildren’ creativity skills (Besançon & Lubart, 2015). Understanding creativity is therefore an issue to more integrated and valued in education. However, to develop this skill, it is essential to understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms.
Research objectives:
The interest of this research is to highlight the link between executive functions and creativity on the one hand and to understand the nature of this link on the other hand. This research work focuses more particularly on the link between the creative act and two executive functions: inhibition and planning and try to highlight the way in which they intervene in creative thinking and in particular in children in CE2. and CM2.
Definition of creativity:
Creativity is defined as the ability of an individual to produce an original response, new and adapted to a context and a situation (Lubart, Mauchiroud, Tordjman & Zenasni, 2003). Thurthermore, creative thinking has been described as a cognitive process made up of three phases: an exploration phase, a production phase and a verification phase (Barbot, 2018). The creative process involves two types of thinking: divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking (Laustriat & Besançon, 2015) consists of finding many answers to one situation and selecting the most original and creative. Convergent thinking consists of integrating the ideas generated in the divergent phase and selecting a single solution to respond to the problem situation (Lubart, Besançon & Barbot, 2011).
Definition of executive functions:
Executive functions correspond to a set of cognitive processes allowing controlled behavior adapted to the situation (Lecompte et al., 2006). At the cerebral level, this is located on the frontal lobes (Miyake et al., 2000). In our research, we are particularly interested on two of executive functions: planning and inhibition. Planning is the ability to develop and mentally coordinate a sequence of actions to achieve a goal (Baker-Sennett, Matusov & Rogoff, 1993, cited by St-Laurent & Moss, 2002). Inhibition is a set of mechanisms to retain in a controlled manner a dominant and automatic response in favor of a more adapted and appropriate response (Bonjean & Scouarnec, 2013; Monette & Bigras, 2008).
Literature review :
Through the scientific literature we found studies showing the role of executive functions in creative thinking (Benedek, Jauk, Sommer, Arendasy and Neubauer, 2014). Regarding the link between inhibition and creativity, studies show mixed results. Benedek, Franz, Heene and Neubauer (2012) and Cassotti et al. (2016) found a positive correlation between inhibition and measures of creativity. According to these authors, a strong capacity for inhibition is necessary to provide an innovative, original and creative response because this permit to don’t select the unoriginal ideas that automatically come to mind.
However, other studies support the idea that low inhibition contributes to creativity (Radel, Davranche, Fournier & Dietrich, 2015). Indeed, their results showed that when the participants were exposed to a task with a high demand for inhibition (and therefore a low inhibitory capacity to allocate to the creativity task) they had better performance in the task of divergent thinking with a stronger originality. Thus the generation of ideas during a creativity task would be linked to a low inhibition. In addition, Carson, Peterson and Higgins (2003) also obtained this result by showing that participants who had the highest performance in creativity had lower scores on the inhibition task compared to participants with low creativity. .
Finally, we found few studies regarding the involvement of planning in creativity. In their article in 2003, Isaksen, Dorval and Treffinger defend the idea that to produce a creative response, you have to produce many original ideas but also implement them. This planning phase would then make it possible to assess the development of thinking, orient the choices of strategy and adjust the approach.
Research interests:
The majority of researchers who have studied the link between executive functions and creativity have focused their research on divergent thinking and not on convergent thinking. That’s why, this study has a real interest because it allows us to study the link between executive functions and divergent and convergent thoughts in order to understand the creative process as a whole. In addition, few studies exist to assess the involvement of planning in the creative process, hence the interest of this research project. This research also has a developmental stake, indeed we are interested in the evolution of creative thinking between children in CE2 and CM2. Finally, the originality of the study is based on the use of a digital tool to evaluate the creativity act: the MTCI (Trial Creative Ideation framework) which differs from classic divergent thinking tasks. This test is done in the form of digital evaluation by performing the various tasks on a tablet which will allow us to have a lot of information such as the precise measurement of the response time, the number of strokes made during the graphic design, etc.
Hypothesis and method:
The general hypothesis of this study is on the one hand that disinhibition contributes positively to creative thinking and especially during divergent thinking, and on the other hand, planning would promote creativity and more specifically convergent thinking. In addition, we expect to observe lower performance in creativity and higher performance at the executive level in CM2 pupils. We can think that the inhibitory capacities are more important in CM2 than in CE2 because they have developed it more. Therefore we hypothesize that there is a developmental relationship between executive functions and creativity.
To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the creative thinking and executive functioning of 10 children in CM2 (10 years old) and 8 children in CE2 (8 years old). The participants in this study are pupils of the Félix-Leclerc school in Bouvron (Loire-Atlantique). First of all, we had each CE2 and CM2 participants pass all the tasks evaluating creativity (40 minutes) and then in a second phase we passed all the tests evaluating executive functions (30 minutes).
Because of the sanitary situation linked to Covid 19, we were not able to have a larger sample of participants. In addition, we have not completed the analysis and interpretation of our results. We are currently performing statistical analyzes to test our various theoretical and operational hypotheses.
Bibliography :
Barbot, B. (2018). The dynamics of creative ideation: Introducing a new assessment paradigm. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2529.
Benedek, M., Franz, F., Heene, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2012). Differential effects of cognitive inhibition and intelligence on creativity. Personality and individual differences, 53(4), 480-485.
Benedek, M., Jauk, E., Sommer, M., Arendasy, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). Intelligence, creativity, and cognitive control: The common and differential involvement of executive functions in intelligence and creativity. Intelligence, 46, 73-83.
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Bonjean, A., & Scouarnec, A. (2013). Manifestations exécutives et de la théorie de l’esprit dans l’évaluation langagière des cérébrolésés. Mémoire d’Orthophonie, Université Paris VI.
Carson, S. H., Peterson, J. B., & Higgins, D. M. (2003). Decreased latent inhibition is associated with increased creative achievement in high-functioning individuals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85, 499–506.
Cassotti, M., Agogué, M., Camarda, A., Houdé, O., & Borst, G. (2016). Inhibitory control as a core process of creative problem solving and idea generation from childhood to adulthood. New directions for child and adolescent development, 2016(151), 61-72.
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