Two-year-olds can socially learn to think divergently

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Social Learning Theory
• Child Psychology

Background:

• Recent research indicates that divergent thinking emerges in children as young as one year old.
• Parental divergent thinking has been shown to influence a child's own divergent thinking capabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if two-year-old children can socially learn to increase their divergent thinking.
• To provide the first experimental evidence for enhancing divergent thinking in toddlers.

Main Methods:

• Two groups of two-year-olds (N=22 each) were exposed to different levels of divergent thinking modeled by an experimenter using the Unusual Box Test.
• Divergent thinking was measured by the number of novel actions children performed beyond those modeled.
• Imitation scores were also recorded to compare with divergent thinking performance.

Main Results:

• Children exposed to high levels of modeled divergent thinking (25 actions) exhibited significantly higher divergent thinking than those exposed to low levels (5 actions).
• All children demonstrated higher divergent thinking than imitation scores, indicating a preference for novel actions over copying.
• This study is the first to show that toddlers' divergent thinking can be enhanced through social learning.

Conclusions:

• Two-year-olds can socially learn to think more divergently by observing others.
• Social learning directly impacts individual cognitive processes, suggesting a need for iterative models of social and individual learning.
• This research offers a novel method for increasing divergent thinking in toddlers.