Infants less than a year old can combine simple concepts into complex ideas, showing that creativity begins in babyhood. 

Researchers from the University of Birmingham in the UK, and Central European University in Austria and Hungary, were interested in investigating the origins of creative thinking and the construction of new ideas in adults and at what age this type of thinking ability develops in children. 

Dr Barbara Pomiechowska said that whilst human creativity has enabled impressive and boundless developments and inventions, little is known about how and when humans come to develop ‘the ability to combine ideas and invent new things’. She states that her research shows that we must go right back to the beginning of language acquisition to solve this puzzle.

Using the principle that adults construct new ideas and structures by taking previously unlinked ideas and concepts and combining them to create completely new thoughts and objects, the researchers devised a method to explore whether infants also demonstrate this ability. They took a cohort of children of around 12 months old and taught them two new words to describe quantity – ‘mize’ for one and ‘padu’ for two. By using these two new, and therefore unfamiliar, words to describe the concept of quantity and combining them with a known object word, the infants had to bypass their previous or learnt combinations of words to recognise one or two ducks and had to use their newly constructed words to correctly identify the quantity of objects shown to them. Using eye movement technology, the researchers concluded that infants are able to successfully combine a new idea with a known concept in order to understand their world and that this ability develops early in life. 

Dr Agnes Kovacs, from CEU's Department of Cognitive Science and Cognitive Development Center, commented, ‘For babies, this ability to combine different concepts is likely to help not only to interpret the complex language input, but also to learn about different aspects of the physical and social world. For adults, it's an ability that helps to move past everything that's already been thought of, opening the mind towards endless possibilities’.

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Read more:
University of Birmingham (2024) Creativity starts in the cradle, new research shows. Science Daily, 24 ]uly. Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240710195507.htm <accessed 20 August, 2024>

Original published paper:
Pomiechowska, B. et al. (2024) Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts. PNAS, 121(29):e2315149121. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315149121 <accessed 20 August, 2024>