Creative Thinking Skills and Executive Functions in Preadolescent Children

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 6th-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. 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.