Abstract
The controlled measurement of creative potential in early childhood is imperative for researchers seeking to fully understand the initial emergence and development of creativity. Evidence for original ideation has been demonstrated in infants as young as one year old, through their performance of movement-based, interactive creativity tasks. In this focused review of developmental research, we suggest that embodied movements and interactive play may uniquely facilitate creative thinking in early childhood (i.e., from birth to age six). From this review, we propose that embodied movement reinforces physical interactions that influence cognitions underlying creative behavior. Embodied creativity may supplement traditional creativity measures, as young children may be more inclined to represent their inner thoughts and experiences through movement rather than through language alone. Thus, we explored the importance of embodied creativity as a means of informing current researchers about the development of creativity, and we suggest future experimental research in this area.
Introduction
Ideas that contribute to original problem-solving or promote critical, unique innovations are often held in high regard. From minute displays of personal novelty to everyday problem-solving in corporations and classrooms to broader scale strivings to foster ingenuity, creativity is an omnipresent phenomenon that garners high respect in modern society. Despite the social importance and intuitive appeal of creativity, most researchers have investigated this construct among mature populations. For instance, a PsycINFO search using the keyword “creativity” for peer-reviewed, experimental research publications published in English over the past 20 years revealed 7,119 studies evaluating human participants aged 18 years or older, compared with only 248 studies addressing creativity in participants younger than age six. However, it is also important to study creative and imaginative skill acquisition in early childhood, as successful creative problem-solving requires the ability to comprehend, plan strategies, and set goals for idea generation and solution convergence across the life span (Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005). In addition, given that both genetic predisposition and environmental factors are thought to contribute to individual creativity (Barbot, Tan, & Grigorenko, 2013), it is important to develop a better empirical understanding of how to best assess creative behavior in early childhood. Physical or embodied movement may offer a methodologically viable means of assessing and understanding the development of creativity in early childhood. Children initially use sensorimotor experiences to develop a conceptual understanding of the world (Kontra, Goldin-Meadow, & Beilock, 2012; Marmeleira & Santos, 2019; Wellsby & Pexman, 2014), and previous research suggests that early motor skills may facilitate the construction of semantic memory structures, language, and complex problem-solving ability (Glenberg & Gallese, 2012; Sommerville et al., 2005). To this end, embodiment is particularly relevant to early childhood development research and may illuminate biological, or maturational, differences between children across a variety of psychological outcomes (Marmeleira & Santos, 2019). Recently, a broad narrative review of embodied cognition perspectives across the life span implored researchers to prioritize embodiment in future experimental work with children, as most embodiment research has been conducted with young and middle-aged adults even while several theoretical arguments suggest that embodiment is imperative for complex cognitive functioning (Marmeleira & Santos, 2019). The present review purports to further this paradigm shift toward a narrower focus by highlighting how embodiment approaches may be implemented to better assess psychological outcomes associated with creative thinking in early childhood. We highlight evidence that embodiment in early childhood may exemplify children’s organization of creative cognitions and understanding of novel concepts. We also review the significance of embodied creativity manipulations in early childhood and draw particular attention to existing methods of assessing embodied creativity. Last, we provide clear recommendations for future, methodologically rigorous scientific investigation in this arena.
Important to the methodology for assessing children’s early creative performances is the plausibility of using demonstrable action to facilitate the arrangement of thoughts and behaviors in generating observable creative outputs. Movement is one such fundamental, demonstrable action that may be essential to facilitating creative expression, especially in young children (Evans, Alibali, & McNeil, 2001; Torrance, 1981). Despite indications of the importance of an embodied, or movement-based, approach to understanding early creativity, few creativity theories incorporate the developmental merit of embodied creativity. Beyond theory, there is a practical need to explore and refine an embodiment paradigm in early knowledge acquisition and early childhood learning. In the present narrative review, we synthesize evidence for embodied creativity in early childhood, by focusing primarily on physically interactive early childhood behaviors that may influence mental operations underlying creative performance (Byrge & Tang, 2015). We also explore how scientific inquiry employing embodied creativity may offer insight into current research devoted to evaluating and understanding creative development in early childhood.
Definitions of Creativity in Early Childhood
It is difficult and problematic to confine the illusory concept of creativity to a singular, operational definition (Fishkin & Johnson, 1988). In the adult literature, standard definitions of creativity are summarized by two primary criteria: originality and value (Runco & Jaeger, 2012). Despite much debate, operational derivations of creativity suggest that the emergence of originality and value must be intentional rather than a collection of random processes that are indistinguishable from mere luck or ignorance (Barron, 1955). Typically, creativity researchers evaluate the frequency (i.e., fluency) and diversity (i.e., flexibility) of statistically infrequent or subjectively original responses to stimuli and suggest that subjective evaluations of the creative product should be conducted not only by external raters but also within internally focused, evaluative frames of reference that are imposed by the individual participant (Guilford, 1950; Runco & Jaeger, 2012).
In the early childhood literature, although the core principles of creativity (i.e., originality and value) also apply, children’s creative novelty may be exclusively useful within their personal social context rather than within society at large. Moran, Sawyers, Fu, and Milgram (1988) suggested that traditional definitions of creativity in adulthood may extend to preschool-aged children if researchers abandon the stipulation that original, unusual ideas must also be relevant to society. Thus, Amabile (1989) posited that a creative output becomes original when it is compared with the child’s existing framework of cognitions and behavior, and it becomes valuable when it is meaningful to the child (Amabile, 1989).
Relatedly, Runco (2019) emphasized the important addition of authenticity as a core component of creative thinking. Originality and value are often relegated to creative products or performance-based criterion, while authenticity captures the broader, dynamic creative process. Authenticity may also be essential to operationalizing and measuring creativity that is inclusive of cultural differences (Tan, 2016). Across cultures, authentic individuals are true to themselves, to others, and to the creative process (Runco, 2019). The capacity to form unique and authentic interpretations of personal experience is thought to be universal (Runco, 1996; Solomon, Powell, & Gardner, 1999) and may be foundational to early cognitive and social development, when young children are bombarded with personally novel experiences that must be given meaning in the absence of prior knowledge, practice, or skills (Runco & Chand, 1995; Runco & Pina, 2013). Other important distinctions for studying creativity in childhood involve the particular role of movement in early learning and the need to examine child-typical behaviors such as imitation or play that first illustrate how children begin to interact with and understand their environments. For example, Torrance (1981) proposed that observing bodily motion is an indelibly potent strategy for unveiling creativity in early childhood populations.
Displays of Creativity in Early Childhood
Common Measures of Childhood Creativity
While this review is not an all-encompassing discussion of the panoply of laboratory-based verbal and figural methodologies for creativity assessment in early childhood, we will highlight the discrepancy between commonly utilized measures and the sparse development and implementation of rigorous movement-based creativity evaluations. Creativity assessments in early childhood often rely on measurements of verbal responses; these are often couched within tests of divergent thinking (e.g., generating multiple ideas from a single stimulus; Hocevar & Bachelor, 1989; Zachopoulou, Makri, & Pollatou, 2009) and associative fluency (e.g., the total number of novel associations between stimuli; Dansky & Silverman, 1973). Although researchers have been cautioned to apply different assessment methodologies for young children as compared with adults (Moran, Sawyers, & Moore, 1988), these verbal assessments have been largely derived from, and share commonalities with, adult measures. Some are specifically adapted for young children, such as Wallach and Kogan’s (1965) battery of creativity tests that are designed to accommodate children’s unique learning styles, ill-suited to the formal instructions and strict testing environments of adult creativity examinations. In this test battery, there are verbal divergence assessments such as the Instances Task (e.g., “Please name things that are round.”), the Alternate Uses Task (e.g., “Please list alternate uses for a toothbrush.”), and Similarities (e.g., “Please describe how a train and tractor are similar.”), developed to measure verbal examples of fluency, flexibility, and associative ability, respectively (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). These measures are appropriate for young children, as the stimuli contain items with which young children have already developed a frame of reference. Notably, however, many studies failed to explicitly report the implementation of manipulation checks or pilot research to confirm that the stimuli presented are age-appropriate. In addition, failure to use three-dimensional artifacts as supplements to independent variables (i.e., presentation of a toothbrush for the Alternative Uses Task) may limit preschoolers’ and other young children’s ability to either become familiar with novel stimuli or reintroduce themselves to previously learned concepts or features of the presented object. Previous experimental work has shown that hands-on manipulation of problem elements may promote idea generation among young children (Bijvoet-van den Berg & Hoicka, 2014). Further, a reliance on singular measures of creativity (e.g., isolated verbal measures), while appropriately designed for evaluating the intended outcomes, is not sufficient to fully capture accompanying variables of measurement interest (e.g., verbal, visuospatial, and movement-based measures) that may also signify creative potential (Sawyers et al., 1983).
Some traditional figural measures of creativity rely on nonverbal assessments, such as the Line Meanings and Pattern Meanings tasks that require children to generate interpretations for ambiguous shapes and figures (Feldhusen & Goh, 1995; Wallach & Kogan, 1965). Perhaps the most widely employed creativity tests for both children and adults, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1962; Zachopoulou et al., 2009), include a subtest that explicitly draws on visuospatial abilities (e.g., Thinking Creatively in Pictures subtest) and has been recommended as an age-appropriate measure for preschoolers (Torrance, 1962b) because it does not rely exclusively on verbal components that fail to capture the breadth of creative potential in early childhood.
One potential limitation of research utilizing exclusively verbal and figural creativity assessments is their similarity to adult creativity assessments that may not directly translate to creative assessment in early childhood. For example, young children may be particularly inclined to communicate their thoughts and experiences via kinesthetic behaviors. An incomplete delineation of creative development may emerge when creativity assessment with young children is exclusively verbal, or language-based without consideration of movement-based, or more interactive visuospatial measures, as young children comprehend and connect their internal and external environments by physically interacting with the outer world (Moran et al., 1988).
Movement-Based Measures of Childhood Creativity
Extant Movement-Based Divergent Thinking Assessments Commonly Utilized in Early Childhood.
Torrance’s Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement Test (TCAM) also presumes that very young children manipulate and organize their thoughts in expressive, kinesthetic actions prior to developing proficiency in verbalization, writing, or drawing (Torrance, 1981). The TCAM accommodates young children’s verbal limitations by accepting, but not requiring, children to verbally respond. Although the TCAM was developed for children 3-8 years old (Torrance, 1975), its flexible language requirements may permit TCAM use for even younger children. In fact, both divergent movement ability (DMA), defined as the summation of motor fluency and motor flexibility, as well as creative movement, defined operationally on the test as the addition of motor originality to the DMA score, have been found to correlate with TCAM fluency (i.e., total number of responses) and originality (i.e., statistical infrequency of the child’s responses compared with a larger normative sample; Zachopoulou et al., 2009).
The third movement-based assessment in current use evaluates young children’s DMAs across a battery of fundamental mobility tasks. One task measures the child’s locomotion in different directions, given a variety of interactive equipment resources; the second task requires the child to exhibit balanced bodily conformations, and the third encourages the child’s object manipulation (Cleland & Gallahue, 1993). Cleland and Gallahue (1993) demonstrated that previous movement experiences (e.g., sports participation, exercise, and recreational physical activity) were associated with divergent movement performances, suggesting that preschoolers may be capable of producing more creative movements, depending on their level of training, personal skill, and familiarity with executing certain motor patterns. Thus, the extent of prior experience could be a confounding factor in divergent movement assessments in early childhood (Scibinetti, Tocci, & Pesce, 2011). However, a counterargument is that the level of parental influence, or early academic exposure to activities that might nurture early creativity, presents a similar confound to traditional creativity assessment through verbal or spatial creativity tests. Thus, the measurement of action-based creativity retains its empirical importance, at least as an addendum to creativity test batteries for young children.
In sum, there are very few assessments that have been developed to capture movement-based creative behavior in early childhood, and movement is not typically the default method for examining creativity, despite the fact that very young children, while sometimes unable to provide creative responses in words or drawings, are able to act out their thoughts using symbolic, representational movement (Zachopoulou et al., 2009). Rather than assuming that very young children lack creative ability simply because they cannot express that ability verbally or through detailed illustrations, researchers should consider an assessment paradigm that includes measurement tools that might reflect very early creative cognitions. As young children have relative strengths in sensorimotor development (Zachopoulou et al., 2009), assessing creative potential via fluency and flexibility of full body movement or the number of distinct movement variations exhibited (e.g., fast, slow, high, or low movements; Zachopoulou et al., 2009) merits further examination as a assessment supplements to continued experimental work in this area. A movement-based approach to creativity assessment in real-world scenarios may facilitate a more precise, and complete, assessment of spontaneous creativity and represent a more reliable index of creative potential than tests that measure creativity on demand (Zachopoulou et al., 2009).
Applying Embodied Cognition to the Study of Childhood Creativity
The proposal that the contours of the human mind may be best explored using the physical body as a guide is common in the study of embodied cognition. Embodied approaches to studying cognition suggest that exemplary feats of human intelligence have evolved from sensorimotor interactions with others and with the immediate environment. This view is the crux of embodied cognition (Wilson, 2002), and several theoretical positions give a prominent role to embodied cognition in evolutionary development (Adolph & Hoch, 2019; Barton, 2012; Griffiths & Stotz, 2000; Kaschak & Maner, 2009; Koziol, Budding, & Chidekel, 2012; Smith & Gasser, 2005). One interesting claim is that, through evolution, individuals have developed cognitive-based strategies to simplify or improve problem-solving efficiency. For example, in spatial tasks, such as solving a puzzle, the solver may place the corner pieces at the perimeter of the table in an attempt to represent their configuration in the finished project. Another example is a young child’s simple practice of using her fingers to count (Suggate, Stoegon, & Fischer, 2017), simultaneously dragging her index finger along the lines of a book while learning to read, or learning to recognize letters by moving her whole body in the shape of the letters (Bara & Bonneton-Botte, 2017).
Relatedly, training overt motor behaviors has been found to better facilitate kindergarteners’ ability to learn and recognize letters, as well as enhance handwriting quality than visual training (Bara & Bonneton-Botte, 2017). These motor actions need not be confined to handwriting simulations; rather, gross motor actions (e.g., moving the entire arm to mimic the shape of a letter) are expected to not only benefit acquisition of early written communication skills but also to aid mental representations of complex tasks (Bara & Bonneton-Botte, 2017; Suggate & Stoegon, 2017). That is, both access to mental operations and the construction of new knowledge schemas may be streamlined as children learn to interpret the world around them and communicate effectively (Suggate, Stoegon, & Fischer, 2017). The fundamental premise of embodied cognitive simplification strategies is that they reduce the mental workload required to solve tasks, freeing the mind to effectively offset cognitive limitations and reorganize information (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994). A physical manipulation of the environment is expected to facilitate cognitive restructuring and aid problem-solving as individuals may think through a problem best when they are permitted to interact directly with problem elements (Wilson, 2002).
Although there have been no embodied frameworks to date that specifically focus on the role of sensorimotor interaction in creativity, there are several well-established embodied cognition approaches suggesting that sensorimotor action is crucial for other higher order cognitive developments (Koziol et al., 2012; Westendorp, Hartman, Houwen, Smith, & Visscher, 2011). For example, an evolutionary perspective of development purports that multiple higher order cognitions involved in cognitive control—often termed executive function or EF—evolved continuously from the functionality of foundational sensorimotor systems that preceded higher order cognitive functions (Koziol et al., 2012). Mechanistically, the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex share functional neural connections that may drive movement and EF (Barkley, 2012). Theoretically, perceptual-motor stimuli may require input from the cerebellum, a highly evolved lower brain structure that contains more than four times as many cells as the human cerebral cortex (Andersen, Korbo, & Pakkenberg, 1992; Pakkenberg, Evans, Maller, Braendgaard, & Gundersen, 1989). The cerebellum has been said to serve as a primary governor of movement and thought (Ito, 1993), and it may be a hub for promoting adaptive learning and creative problem-solving via collaboration with working memory processes (Vandervert, Schimpf, & Liu, 2007). To this end, it is plausible that cerebellar input may be a mechanistic behemoth that underlies creative output and facilitates perceptual, motor, and executive manipulation of problem components.
Relatedly, in developmental work, research has demonstrated a link between early executive functioning performance and an infant’s capacity for prospective motor planning and control (Gottwald, Achermann, Marciszko, Lindskog, & Gredebäck, 2016). Theoretically, a progression from success in directing lower level movements in infancy (e.g., grasping or maintaining balance) may confer benefits to the proliferative development of higher level executive cognitions across early childhood (Barkley, 2012; Gottwald et al., 2016; Karmiloff-Smith, 2015; Wolpert, Diedrichsen, & Flanagan, 2011). Developing EF in early childhood promotes online anticipatory ability to update frames of reference and adapt to changes in the environment upon the presentation of new stimuli, as well as purposeful offline planning for the organization of goal-directed actions (Koziol et al., 2012). Together, this work suggests that actions are not a consequence of the cognitive processes involved in executive functioning but are rather the scaffolding for a rich, developing mental architecture (Sommerville & Decety, 2006; Trudeau & Dixon, 2007).
Embodied approaches to EF are especially relevant to creativity, as EF may also be instrumental to the execution and comprehension of creative activities in early childhood. Mechanistically, dorsolateral frontal cortex projections to the head of the caudate nucleus are suggested to be a primary pathway for both EF and abstract thinking (Alvarez & Emory, 2006). Research has suggested that frontal lobe functions, integral to EF, are not wholly responsible for the optimal integration of all associated EF components (Alvarez & Emory, 2006). Specifically, nonfrontal areas may also subserve distinct EF subprocesses. This is quite similar to evidence suggesting that certain aspects of creative thinking are frontal lobe dependent; however, creativity is a dynamic and complex process that is functionally distributed across networks in the human brain (Beaty, Benedek, Silvia, & Schacter, 2016; Vartanian, Bristol & Kaufman, 2013). Creativity is thought to arise through a distributed neural network, integrating functional connections between regions in the internally directed default network (posterior cingulate cortex), which is activated during mind wandering and mental imagery, and the externally directed executive control network (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), which is activated during working memory, flexible thinking, and externally directed attention (Beaty, Benedek, Kaufman, & Silvia, 2015). Thus, the functional coupling of these structures may indicate that creativity is reliant on both internally oriented, spontaneous mental representations and executive, regulatory filters to limit irrelevant or intrusive stimuli and effectively externalize the most appropriate creative responses (Beaty et al., 2015).
Several relationships between EF and creativity have been proposed (Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010). The theory that young children are capable of utilizing task-specific strategies to orient themselves toward a broader goal emphasizes the importance of a global EF directive that is differentially influenced by several subfactors, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, attentional control, updating, prepotent response inhibition, and so forth (Miyake et al., 2000). Creativity may be uniquely influenced by EF, with research indicating positive relationships between continuous updating and monitoring, reduced inhibition, and divergent thinking (Benedek, Jauk, Sommer, Arendasy, & Neubauer, 2014). Reduced psychological and behavioral inhibition may be an asset for creative problem-solving, as disinhibited individuals may be well-equipped to form remote associations between seemingly unrelated concepts and to adopt a suprainclusive thinking style that would, arguably, exponentiate ideational fluency and the potential for originality (Martindale, 1999).
An embodied approach to early childhood creativity appears to be important for several reasons. First, early childhood affords a unique developmental period in which there have been few systematic studies of embodied creativity. Second, consideration of potential relationships between action-based measures and creativity may be crucial to appropriately assess younger samples who are not well versed in linguistic communication. Third, embodied approaches are well established in the study of other higher order cognitive functions. Of particular note is EF, as EF has demonstrated links to creativity and potential parallels for considering the role of movement in creativity. These parallels between EF, divergent thinking, and creative output in this transition period to formal education warrant further examination.
Support for an Embodied Account of Creativity in the First 6 Years
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is often credited with bringing awareness to the fact that cognition qualitatively varies across the life span (Fischer, 1980; Piaget, 1971), and as such, tailored assessments may be required for evaluating specific age groups. Piaget’s work in creative thought reflected this sentiment and resulted in perhaps the earliest attempts to study creative behavior in the childhood period. Several researchers have since cultivated the theoretical landscape of early embodied cognition, describing how children learn to interact with, and adapt to, their environments through bodily motion (Caramazza, Anzellotti, Strnad, & Lingnau, 2014; Goldin-Meadow & Beilock, 2010; Marmeleira & Santos, 2019; Shapiro, 2010). In this vein, the explorative variability of early interaction, contingent on past experience as well as the perceptual demands of the immediate environment, fosters progressive learning and development (Smith & Gasser, 2005; Wellsby & Pexman, 2014). In fact, a wealth of extant research highlights the importance of connections between learning and physical interactions with the environment. Specifically, studies have explored how imaginative play introduces a positive environment that allows children to recall, manipulate, explore, and construct experiences in ways that are analogous to divergent thinking (Boyd, 2009; Russ & Wallace, 2013). Research on play also emphasizes that opportunities for the development of complex cognitions are uniquely afforded by interactive play, as children practice self-regulatory behaviors and plan goal-directed actions that align with their imaginary scenarios (Ebert, Hoffmann, Ivcevic, Phan, & Brackett, 2015). For example, the role-playing child may pretend she is a veterinarian and that her stuffed animals are sick patients. In imitating social roles, children must engage conscious reflection to plan socially appropriate pretend activities and represent episodic experiences in novel ways (Elkonin, 2005). This developmental progression also manifests in the way that children initially interact with symbolic, tangible object substitutes, such as using a toy block as a phone, as well as later advancements toward using symbolic, invisible object substitutes, such as conveying a phone conversation using hand gestures or other forms of representative movement (Bodrova, Germeroth, & Leong, 2013; Novack & Goldin-Meadow, 2017).
Other forms of symbolic, interactive movement, such as dance or artistic expression, may also be a source of experiential learning (Singer, Singer, D'Agnostino, & DeLong, 2009; Yetti, Syarah, Pramitasari, Syarfina, & Susanti, 2019). Expressive movement and the arts encourage reflection, imaginative problem-solving, exploration, and emotional regulation in early childhood (Deans, 2016; Ebert et al., 2015; Winner, Goldstein, & Vincent-Lancrin, 2014). Despite the importance of experiential learning through play, researchers have found that children’s time spent engaging in play has been declining worldwide (Singer et al., 2009). This may be a consequence of more time spent consuming television content and engaging in other forms of technological entertainment (Singer & Singer, 2009), participation in structured extracurricular activities designed to foster early academic achievement (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009), safety concerns in large metropolitan areas and low-income neighborhoods, and reduced time afforded to recess in elementary schools (Singer et al., 2009). Given sociocultural and environmental constraints on play, more research is needed to demonstrate the value of free play for cognitive development (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Eyer, 2004; Singer et al., 2009). Play may uniquely promote novel learning that departs from rote memorization to emphasize learning through doing, or embodied physical interaction with the environment (Deans, 2016; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2004; Singer et al., 2009).
Given the importance of embodied cognition in childhood, it is not surprising that research has explored how playful physical interactions with specific stimuli may influence creative performance in preschoolers. Dansky and Silverman (1973) demonstrated that preschoolers participating in interactive play with covert stimulus materials achieved higher divergent thinking performances than children assigned to an imitation group, in which they only watched an experimenter interact normally with covert stimuli, or children assigned to a control group in which they merely colored. After these manipulations, participants were asked to generate ideas for all potential uses they could imagine for each stimulus item. Children who interacted with these stimulus items, even without knowing they would be subjected to a subsequent creativity assessment utilizing the same items, generated more nonstandard uses than both the imitation and control groups, which were not significantly different from one another. The authors suggested that physical interaction stimulates combinatory associative processes that can be mapped onto a cognitive task comprised of instructions to cogitate original ways to interact with the objects (Dansky & Silverman, 1973).
Despite the lack of any unified embodied approach or framework to highlight creativity development in early childhood, several studies spanning multiple research disciplines have provided empirical support for embodied creativity. Research to date has tended to address the role of movement for enhanced creativity in an indirect, nonsystematic fashion, using naturalistic play, imagination, and environmental interaction to measure creativity. As language and verbal skills are less developed during the first six years than later in childhood, movement-based manipulations may represent more practical ways to capture young children’s creative performances. Taken together, past work assessing early childhood creativity with methods most appropriate to developmental learning in this age period has provided convincing preliminary evidence for the utility of an embodied approach to the study of creativity.
Using Movement-Based Measures to Promote Early Childhood Creativity
Several studies have either assessed creativity through children’s physical movement or accounted for the involvement of physical movements in children’s creative output. However, as aforementioned, only three existing creativity assessments employed divergent movement as an outcome variable (see Table 1). These methods involved the child’s production of novel actions that followed the presentation of interactive stimuli or instructive opportunities to explore and communicate ideas through movement. A suggested explanation for the choice to observe creativity through toddler’s movement is their proclivity for imitation, underscoring the importance of social learning in the initiation of new movements. Imitative social learning may also familiarize young children with the general embodiment of creative expressions (Bijvoet-van den Berg & Hoicka, 2014). Another potential developmental pathway by which young children are creative is through improvisational problem-solving. Problem-solving often requires behavioral interactions with physical objects, wherein the solver must conduct an inclusive search for viable candidates to meet the demands of the problem at hand. Sometimes, the correct appurtenances for solving complex tasks are not readily available, requiring the child to attempt to substitute other objects that could be used to perform similar, adaptable functions as the desired item.
Play and imagination
Symbolic play has been shown to have a beneficial effect on preschoolers’ acute associative verbal fluency for ideas on the Alternative Uses Task (Dansky & Silverman, 1973; Guilford, 1967). Notable mediators for facilitating creativity via play include the child’s familiarity with, or preference for, certain objects that might influence the production of novel associations or the child’s individual inclination to attend to distant environmental and physical cues that are seemingly unrelated to the immediate creative scenario (Sutton-Smith, 1967; Wallach, 1970). Broader attentional allocation may activate a search for usable extraneous stimuli and further enhance creative output (Wallach, 1970). Notably, however, even if play reliably increases a child’s generation of unusual associations, there has been little research to support the longitudinal effects of play on creativity over time (Dansky & Silverman, 1973). Thus, we must still question whether free-play behaviors in childhood predict later ability to form unusual, creative associations and problem solutions in adulthood. Causal support for the benefits of play on sustained creative production has not been demonstrated. Nevertheless, if creativity may be developed and refined throughout the life span, early childhood would seem to be a crucial point for intervention. Specifically, ages 3-5 years may mark a developmental period when children may be most receptive to programs designed to promote creativity (Fauth, 1990; Schirrmacher, 1993; Zachopoulou, Konstadinidou, & Archimedes Project Research Group, 2006).
Anecdotal evidence has highlighted children's imaginative capacity to react to their environments in unexpected and creative ways during play. For example, Parsonson and Baer (1978) employed three experimental tasks with a small sample of 3-6 year olds, including (a) using a hammer to pound wooden pegs into a bench-top, (b) storing marbles in containers without losing any, and (c) threading shoelaces through shoe eyelets. After exposure to the exemplar tools, children were afforded the opportunity to utilize a variety of alternative objects, which were either distractor stimuli or could be successfully improvised to serve archetypical functions of hammers, storage containers, or shoelaces. For the hammer task, children were trained to substitute alternative tools, such as bricks, blocks, or rods. Gloves and cups could be used to store marbles in place of original storage containers, and, instead of shoelaces, children could select items such as a string, wire, or pipe cleaners for threading through shoe eyelets. Following training, preschoolers exhibited increased improvisational performance compared with baseline assessments. That is, alternative substitution training was modestly effective in increasing the total number of complex improvisations children performed, during which they did not simply utilize alternative objects in their original form to satisfy task objectives, but modified or adapted tools in a novel way. Taken together, although personal, developmental, and social differences may complicate the implementation of large training studies, there has been reasonable experimental evidence that children are receptive to and capable of learning problem-solving strategies that may facilitate the emergence of creative thinking during childhood (Parsonson & Baer, 1978).
Tactile and environmental considerations
Tactile learning approaches also illustrate embodiment as a path to fostering and assessing creativity. Young children may form meaningful cognitive representations of objects experienced in three-dimensional versus two-dimensional space. In 1976, Starkweather noted that preschoolers should be afforded opportunities to physically manipulate stimuli as a means of assessing creativity. When identifying similar pattern sequences, an object presented to the child may help them generate creative ideas, whereas a two-dimensional drawing may not, simply because the drawing requires a level of abstraction that is not developmentally appropriate to the young child’s conceptualization skills. Young children are more inclined to investigate a potentially novel three-dimensional object, relying on better developed sensorimotor skills (Fu, Kelso, & Moran, 1984; Starkweather, 1964, 1971).
Tegano and Moran (1989) demonstrated that originality in the evaluation of pattern meaning (e.g., a task requiring ideation of all possible things that a stimulus might represent) was enhanced following the child’s direct contact with, or “handling,” of both two-dimensional stimuli (pictures) and three-dimensional stimuli (shapes). Relatedly, the testing environment has been found to play a meaningful role in ideational fluency; cues derived from rich environmental contexts support scanning and search strategies that foster divergent thinking. However, this experimental finding was reported only for creative (vs. “uncreative”) preschoolers, perhaps indicating an inherent proclivity to integrate environmental cues into active problem-solving approaches from an early age (Ward, 1969). To this end, a laboratory enriched with furnishings, toys, pictures, and so forth may lend more ideas to the perceptive child than a sparse lab space (Moran, 1988; Ward, 1969).
Developmental Considerations Regarding an Embodied Approach to Creativity
Although accumulating evidence suggests promise in an embodied approach to creativity, research to date has shown that cognitive and experiential limitations during early childhood clearly impact children’s creative ability across a number of measures. Thus, there are several important developmental considerations for integrating embodied cognition approaches into the study of creativity in early childhood.
Instructions Must Be Clarified
Differences between children and adults in their creative processes and outputs are to be expected, as infants and children, compared with adults, have limited experiences to draw from and do not possess the social and emotional maturity to perceive and evaluate situations critically (Alfonso-Benlliure, Meléndez, & García-Ballesteros, 2013). Strategies to facilitate optimal development of creativity in children have been suggested by long-lasting training programs, such as the Creative-Aesthetic Approach to School Readiness (Torrance, & Fortson, 1968), as well as by short-term research interventions (Cleland, 1993; Starkweather, 1974; Torrance, 1981; Wallach & Kogan, 1965). One divergent thinking training protocol demonstrated that providing clear instructions to 5-11 year old children to employ originality and fluency in problem-solving was beneficial to figural and verbal creativity performance (Ju Lee, Bain, & McCallum, 2007). Providing clear instructions to younger preschool-aged children may be necessary to ensure that methodological terminology is sufficiently explained to account for potential limitations that could arise if children do not fully comprehend what it means to act in unique and original ways.
Children are perhaps most creative in the way that they cope with, and respond to, novel, daily experiences (Zachopoulou et al., 2009). It is during early development that environmental unfamiliarity abounds and must be interpreted for future meaning within the child’s expanding mental landscape. Many ideas generated by the preschooler will not be highly novel or valuable to society at large, even though they are contextually and personally meaningful to the child. One potentially critical moderator of childhood creativity is the limited developmental capacity of young individuals to readily navigate response hierarchies. Young children, compared with adults, are less able to delineate conventional from unconventional responses (Moran, 1988). Practically, this may warrant not only providing explicit task instructions (Ju Lee et al., 2007) but also asking the child to verbalize all possible responses rather than cautioning them to report only unusual, or highly creative, responses.
Social Aspects of Cognitive Assimilation Must Be Recognized
As aforementioned, creativity is thought to burgeon from birth until about age five (Torrance, 1977), before children become attuned to conventional social and educational expectations. Creativity, particularly divergent thinking, tends to increase from preschool to early adolescence; but it is disrupted by a succession of “creative ruts,” the first of which parallels entry into primary/elementary school (Torrance, 1967, 1977). Thus, young children may be less susceptible than older children to the creative constraints posed by assimilating to the broader educational system (Gardner, 1982). Upon entering elementary school, as students are taught how to learn and apply their knowledge to meet the needs of an existing sociocultural infrastructure, originality may be subverted to the acquisition of verifiable knowledge schemas (Alfonso-Benlliure et al., 2013; Torrance, 1977). Given this transition from cognitive exploration to cognitive alignment through childhood, researchers have suggested that an initial decline in creativity development begins in the fifth year of life (Smith & Carlsson, 1983; Torrance, 1962, 1963; Urban, 1991).
It is important to recall that the development of creativity is a dynamic process, during which the ability to form new associations and generate divergent ideas emerges over time as children mature and add to their personal repertoire of unique experiences (Runco & Albert, 1986). Relatedly, Russ and Fiorelli (2010) recommended that, for the development of creativity to extend from early childhood into adulthood, children must be permitted to participate in imaginative play even while they must also engage in various diverse activities that foster an exploration of individual talents and passions. Children must also learn to solve problems independently and respond to various challenges by approaching problems from different angles; they should be encouraged to openly and appropriately express their feelings and emotions in various social contexts, using strategies to optimize the translation of isolated affectual experiences into memories capable of serving future creative pursuits (Russ & Fiorelli, 2010).
While it is possible for individual creativity to be increased across the life span, this trajectory should not be assumed to follow a linear growth path, as it is likely interrupted by several “slumps” prior to reaching biological maturity (Mullineaux & Dilalla, 2009). Notably, however, Barbot, Lubart, and Busançon (2016) cautioned that such developmental trajectories may be overestimated by analyses conducted on small samples, the use of cross-sectional data to evaluate specific age groups, selection bias, and longitudinal environmental and cultural influences, among other factors (Barbot et al., 2016). Scoring methodologies in measuring creativity may also play a role, as raters are cautioned to score the creative output of preschool participants in consideration of each child’s perspective, as developmental differences between children and adults render standard scoring procedures, normalized to cognitively and behaviorally mature samples, inappropriate (Starkweather, 1964; Zachopoulou et al., 2009).
Minimizing Practice Effects to Maintain Assessment Validity Across Testing Ages
Among the most concerning risks to discerning meaningful developmental trends in creativity development is the challenge presented by task repetition in the assessment process. A potential method for mitigating these risks is to prompt the young child to continuously engage during repeated assessments of the same task, or in a follow-up assessment that is closely related to the initial task. Similarly, children might be instructed to avoid employing thinking or problem-solving strategies that were utilized previously. Notably, however, the administration of similar, but not identical, tasks is problematic in these repeated assessments, as conclusions made relative to task-specific change may be seen as only marginally acceptable approximations of creative development. It is nearly impossible to match task difficulty and participant familiarity with problem attributes on successive testing (Barbot et al., 2016). Notably, however, the preschool tenure must endure as a critical point of intervention, as preschoolers’ performance on divergent thinking tasks have been found to be associated with teachers’ subjective judgments of the same individuals’ creative qualities nearly a decade later (Harrington, Block, & Block, 1983; Mullineaux & Dilalla, 2009).
Conclusions and Future Research Recommendations
Despite the enigmatic challenges of assessing young children’s creativity on a short-term basis in laboratory settings, the controlled measurement of creative potential during early childhood is imperative if researchers are to accumulate a comprehensive understanding of early creativity emergence and development. Employing age- and developmentally appropriate creativity assessments allows researchers to incorporate a tailored approach into the investigation of childhood creativity. However, these tailored considerations should also be explored across diverse cultures, cognitive abilities, and varied demographic characteristics (e.g., educational opportunity and socioeconomic status) of research participants. Researchers should aim to investigate whether and why embodied creativity varies, not only during critical periods of early childhood development but also across cultures and populations. For example, Eastern conceptualizations of creativity tend to be primarily focused on cultivating meaningful experiences, improving upon existing ideas, and attaining inner self-actualization, whereas Western cultures tout the importance of rule-based logic in proposing new ideas, and the generation of original, evaluable products (Rudowicz, 2003; Wonder & Blake, 1992). Definitions of creative personalities are distinct across cultures, with Western cultures more likely to highlight cognitive attributes of intellect, skill, individualism, and imagination (Runco & Bahleda, 1986; Runco, Johnson, & Bear, 1993), while other cultures emphasize collectivist personality traits, such as helping and inspiring others, contributing to society, and being emotionally sensitive and socially flexible (Rudowicz, 2003; Rudowicz & Hui, 1997; Runco et al., 1993; Welchsler & Martinez, 2001). It is also worth mentioning that variability within cultures accounts for differences in creativity assessment outcomes. These within-culture contextual variables include educational opportunity, associated academic success, and socioeconomic factors (Gajda, Karwowski, & Beghetto, 2017).
Although clear differences in creative expression are evident between and within cultures, we contend that an embodied creativity perspective may be applied cross-culturally. Embodied approaches to fostering and assessing creativity may be administered in early childhood in Eastern cultures to facilitate self-expression by using creative movement to enrich intrinsic motivation to engage in collective learning experiences. Alternatively, as cognitive factors are held in high regard in Western societies (Rudowicz, 2003), action-based creativity may be fostered and evaluated in these cultures by targeting cognitive aspects of the creative process such as early development of complex cognitions. Researchers will need to make cross-cultural comparisons of embodied creativity assessments that are inclusive of diverse populations with varied opportunities to invest in creativity. Such embodied creativity investigations are vital for disseminating practically applicable, evidence-based assessment and promotion strategies that best accommodate the expression of early childhood creativity.
We suggest that an embodied approach to creativity is an exciting avenue for continued scientific inquiry in the context of early childhood development. Action-based measures of creativity may be particularly useful in younger samples in which participants have less language experience and ability and are more inclined to symbolically communicate their inner thoughts and experiences through movement. Other developmentally appropriate research strategies may include testing the efficacy of action-based manipulations for improving creativity. An embodied creativity approach should be rich in novel methods for investigating creativity on a broad scale. Although age and experience may influence the ability to generate novel divergent movement patterns, too little work to date has explored the potential for early divergent movement interventions to influence motor creativity in early childhood or performance on well-established constituents of cognitive creativity, such as through verbal expression, mathematical understanding, spatial comprehension, general insight, creative productivity, and so forth.
From an evolutionary perspective, verbalization is theorized to have first emerged through upper extremity gestural expressions rather than verbal language (Corballis, 1992). To our knowledge, potential associations between individual research participants’ early movement-based creative expressions and their later verbal creative expression have not been investigated. Findings of such a relationship may suggest that externally oriented creativity is, in some way, related to internal representations of creativity, providing further support for the putative importance of the mind–body connection to the development of creativity across the life span. There may be differences in the importance of this relationship for different child populations. For example, elementary school children with autism have been shown to exhibit higher nonverbal originality (drawing incomplete figures) than age-matched students who were not diagnosed with autism (Liu, Shih, & Ma, 2011). Greater attention to detail, sensory hypersensitivity, and, often, superior memory are among the hypothesized explanations for exceptional performance on nonverbal creativity tasks within this population (Liu et al., 2011). Movement has been proposed as a particularly important conduit for meaning-making among children with autism (De Jaegher, 2013), perhaps because motion perception and coordination, motor planning, and execution are all affected by autism (Bhat, Landa, & Galloway, 2011; Papadopoulos et al., 2011). Children with autism often demonstrate heightened interest in and intrinsic motivation to enact repetitive physical behaviors that may ultimately assist their ability to meaningfully interpret the external world (Klin, Danovitch, Merz, & Volkmar, 2007; Lovaas, Newsom, & Hickman, 1987). Thus, while the repetitive, patterned behaviors characteristic of these children have historically been viewed as maladaptive, they may represent needed amenable modifications to their means of understanding their environments (Mercier, Mottron, & Belleville, 2000). Further, tailored approaches to creative assessment with this population may be particularly critical.
Collectively, research reviewed in this article regarding embodied cognition in the context of early childhood creativity provides important insights with implications for methodological considerations in further research. Employing a unifying embodied cognition framework to future research and practice in creativity development for very young children is likely to best inform scientists, educators, and parents in how young children best interact and learn from the world around them, using movement-based problem-solving skills that are integral to early childhood creativity.