Current Projects
Scientific Creativity
This project focuses on how pretense may bolster scientific creativity in young children.
Creativity Measures
This project focuses on new and developmentally appropriate ways to measure creativity in young children and looking at the cognitive skills that may be related to creativity in this age-group.
Observing Creativity
This project focuses on observational measures of creativity in early childhood.
Completed Projects
Executive Functions and Imaginative Play
This project explored whether imaginative play serves as a positive context for developing executive functions (EF) and prosocial behaviors necessary for academic success.
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We found that imaginative play predicted both hot and cool EF, as well as prosocial behavior, after controlling for age and vocabulary. Furthermore, the relationship between imaginative play and prosocial behavior was fully explained by hot EF.
Imaginative Children in the Classroom
This project examined the cognitive and social skills of children who typically engage in imaginative play in comparison to their peers in classroom contexts across multiple informants: child, teacher, and classroom observers.
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We found that across multiple informants, children high in imaginative play exhibited higher cognitive and social skills in the classroom.
Story-Stem Creativity in Preschoolers
The current study aimed to examine how imagination and self-regulation predict preschoolers' creativity using a story-stem creativity task.
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We found that the interaction between imagination and self-regulation predicted creativity using a story-stem task. Specifically, children with high imagination and high self-regulation had the highest creativity scores.