Infants less than a year old can combine simple concepts into complex ideas, showing that creativity begins in babyhood. According to new research at the , in the UK, and , in Austria and Hungary, babies are not only capable of creative thinking well before starting to speak, but this sort of thinking may be essential for language acquisition. In the study, published in PNAS, the researchers set out to explore the origins of human creativity and productive thinking to try to find out how people arrive at completely new thoughts and ideas.
The basic mechanism for doing this is taking familiar concepts and combining them into new structures, but little is known about how early in life these abilities can be used. The researchers found that babies were able to very quickly learn new words that describe small quantities – an impressive achievement – and combine these spontaneously with familiar words to fully understand a phrase. Lead researcher, Dr Barbara Pomiechowska, carried out the research while a postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University (CEU).
She is now an assistant professor in the School of Psychology, at the University of Birmingham, in the UK. Dr Pomiechowska said: “Human creativity has no boundaries: it has taken us to the moon and allowed us to cure deadly diseases – but despite its importance, we don’t yet know when and how this impressive ability to combine ideas and invent new things emerges. This research shows that we must go right back .
