Balancing novelty and appropriateness leads to creative associations in children

Creative cognition is conceived as the process whereby something novel and appropriate is generated. However, the contribution of novelty and appropriateness to creativity is far from being understood, especially during developmental age. 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 pre-trained 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. Our findings provide evidence that children balance novelty and appropriateness to generate creative associations, corroborating previous findings on the adult population and highlighting the relevant contribution of both components to the overall creative process.