Vicarious effects on the creative behavior of retarded and nonretarded children

The effects of observing a model's overt display of a creative drawing response and hearing a description of these actions were assessed with 54 retarded and 68 nonretarded children. The modeled creative strategy was designed to be high in the dimension of elaboration. A multivariate research design was employed to assess the target dimension of elaboration, as well as to determine transfer to tasks of varying degrees of similarity to the model's task and to creative dimensions other than elaboration. The overt modeling of a creative strategy was most effective in improving elaboration, although verbal descriptions also aided performance. Retarded children were less able than nonretarded children to discriminate the essential elements of the model's elaboration strategy and displayed less acquisition of the elaboration strategy but showed comparable gradients of transfer.