Do older and younger adults think creatively in different ways?
Older adults were as creative as younger adults at inventing new uses for objects and better at finding word links, but the two age groups seemed to rely on different mental abilities to get there.
Source
Investigating age-related differences in semantic control mechanisms involved in creative cognition
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Individual-differences comparison of a younger and an older age group, each completing intelligence, executive-function, semantic knowledge/control and creativity tasks over one video-call session plus two online sessions.
- N
- N=120 · 120 analysed participants after excluding people with neurological illness, colour blindness or ADHD: 60 older adults (aged 60-90) and 60 younger adults (students aged 18-35).
- Population
- UK native English speakers: undergraduate psychology students and older adult volunteers from a university panel, with no reported neurological illness.
- Outcome
- Convergent thinking (Remote Associates Test accuracy) and divergent thinking (Alternate Uses Task fluency, elaboration, uniqueness, human creativity ratings and AI-scored originality).
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What they did
The researchers tested 60 younger and 60 older adults on processing speed, fluid reasoning, three executive functions (updating, inhibition, shifting), vocabulary knowledge, and two kinds of semantic control: controlled retrieval of weak word associations and semantic selection among competing meanings. Creativity was measured with the Remote Associates Test (finding one word linking three cues, a convergent task) and the Alternate Uses Task (thinking up unusual uses for a hanger and a bucket, a divergent task), scored five ways including human and AI ratings. Regression models asked which abilities predicted each creativity score and whether this differed by age group.
What they found
Younger adults were faster and had better executive functions, while older adults had more vocabulary knowledge, better controlled retrieval and solved more Remote Associates items; the groups did not differ on the quality of their alternate uses. Remote Associates success was predicted by semantic knowledge (odds of a correct answer rose 1.55-fold per standard deviation) and by working-memory updating, and once knowledge was controlled the older group's advantage disappeared. For divergent thinking, semantic selection predicted more original ideas in younger adults only, whereas in older adults human-rated creativity was predicted by processing speed and, surprisingly, by weaker inhibition.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is a cross-sectional comparison of two age groups at one time point, so it cannot show how creativity changes within a person as they age, and the groups differ in many ways besides age (the younger group were all psychology students). All findings are correlational and the analyses were not preregistered, with many predictors and several creativity metrics tested, raising the risk of chance findings. The divergent-thinking task used only two objects, and knowledge was measured as vocabulary, which the authors note may miss the object and life knowledge that alternate-uses ideas depend on.
Key terms
- Divergent thinking
- Generating many possible answers to an open-ended problem, such as listing unusual uses for a bucket.
- Convergent thinking
- Homing in on one correct solution that satisfies several constraints, such as finding the word linking three cue words.
- Semantic control
- Processes that steer how stored knowledge is retrieved and selected so that it fits the current goal.
- Controlled retrieval
- Deliberately searching memory for a weak or less obvious association when automatic activation fails.
- Semantic selection
- Choosing the task-relevant meaning among several competing ones while suppressing strong but irrelevant associations.
- Remote Associates Test
- A convergent-thinking test in which people find a single word linked to three given cue words.
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Quiz yourself
Which task in this study measured convergent thinking?
Common questions
Does this mean creativity does not decline with age?
For the verbal tasks used here, older adults matched younger adults on idea quality and beat them on word-link problems, but this is one cross-sectional sample of relatively healthy volunteers, not a test of change over time.
Why did older adults do better on the Remote Associates Test?
Their advantage was explained by their larger vocabulary: when semantic knowledge was included in the model, the effect of age group was no longer significant.
How can weaker inhibition help creativity?
The authors suggest that filtering out fewer loosely related ideas may let more unusual associations surface, which could make older adults' ideas seem more creative.
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