Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Creative potential in childhood predicts creative achievementslater in life. But relatively little is known about the factors andprocesses that promote creativity in children. A theoreticalframework by Carr, Kendal, and Flynn (2016) identified sev-eral factors, including curiosity and exploration, that might fa-cilitate creativity and innovation. Building on this framework,we propose another factor – children’s feeling of competence– that might affect both curiosity and creativity. In the presentstudy, 5- to 7-year-olds were induced feelings of high or lowcompetence by solving math problems. Next, they completedthree tasks that measured their curiosity and creativity. Thefindings showed that children who felt more competent ex-plored more on a novel toy and showed better creative prob-lem-solving abilities.