Age-Related Changes and Reorganization of Creativity and Intelligence Indices in Schoolchildren and University Students

Abstract

Despite the lasting interest towards the relationship between intelligence and creativity, comparably less attention is paid to its age-related changes. Our paper considers the organization of fluid intelligence and psychometric indicators of creativity and is based on the experimental data obtained for children aged 11 (n = 99) and for young adults (n = 77). We used two figural and verbal tasks with and without time limit. We found that the age-related differences in creativity are dependent on the context and the type of testing. The young adults were different from the children, having higher indicators of verbal and figurative creativity, except for the originality of the drawings created within the Incomplete Figures test, and having considerably higher test results for fluid intelligence. These age-related differences, together with the discovered closer relationship between the creativity indicators in the young adults group compared to the children, might suggest insufficient contribution of the components of the executive control of information selection (inhibition, shifting, and updating), which had not fully formed in eleven-year-olds. The comparison of the various indicators of creativity suggests that the most complex task for the children was the composition of an original sentence by joining nouns from various semantic categories.