Description
In this talk of the synchronized event of the virtual conference, I presented a study in which we examined the divergent thinking (DT) processes of four-year-old children. In this study, children were encouraged to report on their thinking processes through interactive dialogues while performing a widely used DT task, the Alternative Uses Task (AUT). Content analysis of children’s utterances revealed that children generated uses mostly based on automatic, bottom-up associative processes and occasionally based on effortful, top-down executive processes. Using (multilevel) regression analysis, we found that (1) both associative and executive DT processes predicted children’s fluency scores on the AUT, whilst only the executive DT process Performing mental operations on the stimulus uniquely predicted originality; (2) children at the age of four years already showed a serial order effect in the originality of their responses, indicating that the originality of uses increased the later a particular use was generated in the series of mentioned uses; and (3) similar serial order effects characterized the occurrence of executive processes. These results suggest that increasing originality depends on increasing involvement of effortful executive processes. Especially the executive process of mentally isolating properties or parts of objects and the subsequent recombination of these parts and properties into a new structured whole might be a key characteristic of DT to generate original ideas.| Period | 16 Jul 2020 |
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| Event title | SIG 05 Conference 2020: Early Childhood Education: Growing Up in Dynamic and Changing Times |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |