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Updated: Mar 25, 2026

The Innovation Arena: A Method for Comparing Innovative Problem-Solving Across Groups
Published on: May 13, 2022
Individual differences in children's innovative problem-solving are not predicted by divergent thinking or executive
Sarah R Beck1, Clare Williams2, Nicola Cutting2
1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, West Midlands, B15 2TT, UK s.r.beck@bham.ac.uk.
Abstract:
Recent studies of children's tool innovation have revealed that there is variation in children's success in middle-childhood. In two individual differences studies, we sought to identify personal characteristics that might predict success on an innovation task. In Study 1, we found that although measures of divergent thinking were related to each other they did not predict innovation success. In Study 2, we measured executive functioning including: inhibition, working memory, attentional flexibility and ill-structured problem-solving. None of these measures predicted innovation, but, innovation was predicted by children's performance on a receptive vocabulary scale that may function as a proxy for general intelligence. We did not find evidence that children's innovation was predicted by specific personal characteristics.
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