Examining the impact of children's exploration behaviors on creativity

Creativity is typically measured using divergent thinking tasks where participants are asked to generate multiple responses follow-ing a prompt. However, being able to generate responses captures only a partial picture of creativity. Convergent thinking, in which a single solution is chosen, is an equally important part of creativity that is often left out of divergent thinking assessments. Moreover, as the field of creativity evolves, exploration is starting to be recog-nized as an understudied component of how children generate and apply creative solutions. The current study moved beyond typical divergent thinking tasks and examined a measure of creativity that also captured 4-to 6-year-old children's convergent thinking and exploration behaviors. A total of 130 children participated in a cre-ative problem-solving task where they were asked to remove a ball from a jar using everyday objects. Children's actions were coded as divergent thinking, convergent thinking, or exploration behaviors. Results demonstrated that divergent and convergent thinking per-formance was not associated with success on the task, indicating that simply generating and selecting more responses is not always enough to achieve a creative outcome. Children's exploration behav-iors were positively associated with success on the task. Exploration behaviors were more likely to lead to success if they were purposeful and iterative. These findings provide some of the first evidence that children's exploration is a vital component of creativity. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc.