Honghong Bai
PhD, Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University; Tsignhua Lab of Brain and Intelligence, Beijing, China
Dr. Bai’s research objective is to explore how young children express their creativity through object exploration and the “Unusual Box Task” designed by Hoicka and colleagues (2013) to test divergent thinking. Past studies have shown that object exploration can disentangle the myth of creativity in early years, when creativity acumen cannot be explored through verbal metrics. The study of creativity in very young children can help answer how creativity originates, which can inform the development of artificial intelligence and also provide information about how parents and educators can create more “creativity friendly” environments for children.
Dr. Bai’s research includes Dutch and Chinese children ages two to four years. The children will engage in a series of tasks including the Unusual Box Task, two self-regulation tasks, a selective attention task, and a visio-spatial working memory task. Based on her findings, Dr. Bai proposes that creativity consists of two iterative processes: discovering new object-affordances and relating different affordances to create more complex affordances with new possibilities. Additionally, she will carry out mediation analyses to test whether specific traits of children mediate the cultural differences in their exploratory behaviors.
Dr. Bai’s research focuses on creativity in children as a dynamic exploration process as opposed to earlier studies that explore creativity as a stable psychological trait. She asserts,
“For a long time, creativity has been predominantly studied as a stable psychological trait of individuals that carries over different physical and social situations…. [T]his line of studies suffered from a prominent limitation, pointing to the fact that creativity is highly dynamic (in relation to the process) and situated in nature (in relation to the context).”
The line of exploration Dr. Bai is pursuing the idea that creativity emerges from the constant (mostly also iterative) interactions between individual traits and physical and social environments. Because there is virtually no research on very young children that also takes cultural differences into account, Dr. Bai’s study is original and may provide valuable information for us to re-think or re-conceptualize what creativity actually is and how creativity originates and emerges in young human beings.
Kim van Broekhoven
PhD, Radboud Teachers Academy, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Dr. van Broekhoven’s research explores the extent to which long term interactions between group members influence the emergence of creativity over time. She observes that the “input-process-output” or IPO model is most typically used to study group productivity, but notes that this model is generally restricted to observing interactions between group members at a single point in time, rather than over time. She notes that “…the emergence of creativity via communicative patterns between group members over time remains underexplored, while this process shapes the production of ideas. As such, based on the sociocultural approach to creativity, we aim to identify blocking and enabling communication patterns that emerge from interactions between students, and to investigate how these communicative patterns affect group creativity over time.”
Dr. van Broekhoven’s research design focuses on five groups of undergraduate students in four sessions in which students identify and define a lifestyle problem, and develop an innovative solution. She will conduct a fine-grained, moment-to-moment interaction analysis where every turn of a participant will be coded. By coding every turn of a participant, she hopes to identify communicative patterns in how ideas are proposed, and responses of team members. Communicative patterns will be correlated to the quality of each generated idea to answer the question as to how blocking and enabling communicative patterns between group members influences the emergence of creativity over time.
Dr. van Broekhoven’s research will bring creativity scholarship further by investigating the moment-to-moment interaction between group members that shapes the production of creative ideas. She will test her assertion that group creativity can only be properly understood in the context of what other people say in the preceding and succeeding turns; what actually happens in the moment-to-moment group interaction over time remains an unexplored research path. As she states, “By doing this, I aim to open up this black box of group creativity, and how we can cultivate group creativity. Second, this research will not only use traditional scoring methods, but will also apply novel computational methods to assess creativity via natural language processing (i.e., semantic distance).”