Balancing novelty and appropriateness leads to creative associations in children

Creative problem solving is a fundamental skill of human cognition and is conceived as a search process whereby a novel and appropriate solution is generated. However, it is unclear whether children are able to balance novelty and appropriateness to generate creative solutions and what are the underlying computational mechanisms. Here, we asked children, ranging from 10 to 11 years old, to perform a word association task according to three instructions, which triggered a more appropriate (ordinary), novel (random), or balanced (creative) response. Results revealed that children exhibited greater cognitive flexibility in the creative condition compared to the control conditions, as revealed by the structure and resiliency of the semantic networks. Moreover, responses’ word embeddings extracted from pretrained deep neural networks showed that semantic distance and category switching index increased in the creative condition with respect to the ordinary condition and decreased compared to the random condition. Critically, we showed how children efficiently solved the exploration/exploitation trade-off to generate creative associations by fitting a computational reinforcement learning (RL) model that simulates semantic search strategies. Our findings provide compelling evidence that children balance novelty and appropriateness to generate creative associations by optimally regulating the level of exploration in the semantic search. This corroborates previous findings on the adult population and highlights the crucial contribution of both components to the overall creative process. In conclusion, these results shed light on the connections between theoretical concepts such as bottom-up/top-down modes of thinking in creativity research and the exploration/exploitation trade-off in human RL research.