Unlocking the Secret: How Early Childhood Shapes Creative Genius

Date:                     July 10, 2024

Source:                 University of Birmingham

Summary:              New research indicates that babies can begin grasping complex language and ideas.

 

Creativity starts in infancy, as evidenced by the ability of infants under a year old to integrate basic ideas into more complex ones.

New research from Central European University in Austria and Hungary and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom suggests that infants are not only able to think creatively long before they talk, but that this kind of thinking may be crucial for language acquisition.

In the study, published in PNAS, the researchers set out to uncover the origins of human creativity and productive thinking to try to find out how people arrive at wholly new concepts and ideas.

The primary technique for achieving this is taking existing concepts and integrating them into new structures, although little is known about how early in development these talents might be deployed.
The researchers discovered that infants could pick up new words that represent small amounts extremely quickly—an amazing feat—and then naturally blend them with terms they already knew to comprehend a sentence in its entirety.
 

Dr. Barbara Pomiechowska, the lead researcher, conducted the study while working as a postdoctoral associate at the Central European University (CEU). She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Birmingham's School of Psychology in the United Kingdom.

We don't yet know when and how this amazing ability to integrate ideas and create new things originates, despite the fact that human creativity has carried us to the moon and helped us cure fatal diseases, according to Dr. Pomiechowska. This study demonstrates that in order to address this conundrum, we need to start at the very beginning of language acquisition.
 

The study's group consisted of 60 infants, all of whom were about 12 months old.

They began by teaching the infants two new words that describe quantity: "padu," which means "two," and "mize," which means "one."

The infants were then instructed to combine these new number words with various object names, such as "padu ducks," from a selection of pictures.
 

Instead of only having the infants recollect word combinations they already knew from prior experience, the researchers tested their capacity to mix concepts in real time by giving them new words to indicate numbers.

The researchers demonstrated that the infants could successfully integrate the two ideas to comprehend the question by utilizing eye-tracking technology to measure the babies' gaze.