Creative Thinking Skills and Executive Functions in Preadolescent Children

ABSTRACT

Creative thinking is understood as individual cognitive and meta-cognitive processes that generate innovative and adaptive ideas. Although studies have suggested that executive functions (EF) play an important role in creative thinking, this association is unclear across later childhood. Based on a comparative (high and low) clustering analysis of creative thinking performance (PIC-N test), this study aimed to identify individual differences in EF (Working-Memory -WM-, Cognitive Flexibility, Inhibitory Control, and Planning) in a group of 60 preadolescents (children from 6^th-grade primary school), whose were selected from two Spanish schools with different methodological approaches (Cooperative and Individualistic learning). The results revealed that high creative thinking scores were associated with better performance on WM and Cognitive Flexibility tasks. Our findings are supported by previous studies which suggest a relationship between EF and creative thinking, and we consider possible influences of cooperative learning as a contextual factor.

Plain Language Summary

This study analyzed the relationship between creative thinking and executive functions (working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control and planning) in pre-adolescent students from 6th-grade of Primary School (12 years old). The findings revealed that high creative thinking (measured by PIC-N test) was associated with better performance on working memory (measured by 2-Back and Sternberg tasks) and cognitive flexibility (Number-Letter task). Moreover, our findings indicate the possible influence of teaching methodology on creative thinking. Our findings highlight the importance of studying the relationship between creative thinking and executive function across Primary School, and contextual factors which could be involved in order to improve teaching-learning processes, especially teaching interventions through classroom methodologies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

All authors have been involved in the design of the study and drafting of the manuscript. All authors have approved the final version.

Availability of data and materials

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The private data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

Consent for publication

All participants gave permission for the publication of their data.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All procedures were approved by the research ethics board of the University of Almería and by the Provincial authority of Education of the Autonomous Community of Andalucía government. All participants provided informed consent to take part in the experiments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Grant PID2019–111454RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 from Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation – Spanish State Research Agency, to the last author.