Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What is creativity and how does it develop? Intuitively, it seems that children are often especially creative, but it isdifficult to find measures that are precise and comparable across development. In this study we use a creative foragingtask that involves the exploration of a high-dimensional space. This task precisely measures elements of creativity, whichwe compare between 4- to 8-year-olds and adults. We find that children show exploration-exploitation behavior in theircreative search resembling adults search. However, children are more exploratory in nature - compared to adults, theyspend a higher percentage of their search in exploration mode, and their exploitation phases are less optimal comparedto adults. Moreover, the products of childrens creative search are more often unique, compared to those of adults; andyounger children create more unique shapes than older children. Together, these results support the hypothesis that creativesearch may change across development, both in how the space of possibilities is navigated and what ideas are ultimatelygenerated. These findings inform not only our understanding of why childrens learning may sometimes be superior thanthat of adults, but also may inform our understanding of creativity and the creative process across development.