Evidence against a relation between bilingualism and creativity

Multilingualism, multicultural experience, cognition, and creativity

The once widely held notion that bilingualism is related to enhanced cognitive functions has recently been challenged, in particular among young adults, as opposed to children and older adults. This strand of research, however, is essentially focused on executive functions (e.g., attention, inhibition, and shifting). But there is another side to the bilingualism-cognition story. Indeed, growing evidence has shown that bilingualism, and by extension multilingualism, are associated with enhanced creativity. However, this relation is arguably quite complex, for several reasons. First, creativity is a fuzzy notion; it is usually conceptualized as a mix of cognitive, personality and motivational factors. Second, multilingual people generally have a richer multicultural experience than monolingual people. In addition, multicultural experience itself is also positively related to creativity. Hence, there are manifold relations between cognition, creativity, multilingualism, and multicultural experience. In this brief research report, using a latent variables model which replicates some of our recent findings, we show that both multilingualism and multicultural experience are positively associated with creativity, even when controlling for cognitive abilities (divergent thinking and intelligence). We discuss these results in a perspective that considers methodological challenges and factors that are relevant to goal-directed behavior.

Bilingualism and creativity across development: Evidence from divergent thinking and convergent thinking

Introduction

Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of creativity from bilingualism. Divergent thinking and convergent thinking are considered the two most important components of creativity. Various (although not all) studies have concluded that bilingual children outperform monolingual children in divergent thinking, however, no study on children or adolescents so far has explored the relation between bilingualism and convergent thinking, or the brain structural basis of interaction between bilingualism and creativity. This study aimed to explore the impact of bilingualism on both convergent and divergent thinking in children and adolescents based on neuropsychological assessments, and the possible structural basis of the effect of bilingualism on creativity by a whole-brain analysis of regional gray matter volume (rGMV) and cortical thickness in children and adolescents.

Methods

92 healthy children and adolescents of age 4-18 were recruited from public or private schools in the French-speaking side of Switzerland. Demographic data of the participants were collected, including gender, age, pedagogy, usage of language, and parents' socioeconomic status. Most of the participants underwent the neuropsychological assessments of divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and fluid intelligence. Structural image data of 75 participants were analyzed. Both voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and surface-based morphometry (SBM) were processed, to perform the analyses of rGMV and cortical thickness respectively.

Results

The outcomes indicated that convergent thinking, but not divergent thinking benefits from bilingualism in children and adolescents. However, this bilingual advantage appears to weaken across development. Unexpectedly, no significant correlation between morphometry and bilingualism was found. Neither divergent thinking scores nor convergent thinking scores showed any significant correlation with rGMV. However, the whole brain SBM showed that the cortical thickness in the right supplementary motor area (SMA) was negatively correlated with convergent thinking scores, which suggested that the children and adolescents with higher convergent thinking abilities may have thinner, more mature, and more activated cortex in the right SMA.

Discussion

Bilingualism and cortical thinness in the right SMA might facilitate convergent thinking independently, by enhancing this selective ability.

Bilingualism and creativity: Benefits from cognitive inhibition and cognitive flexibility

Bilingualism has been shown to be associated with creativity, but the mechanisms of this association are not very well understood. One possibility is that the skills that bilinguals use in switching back and forth between languages also promote the cognitive processes associated with creativity. We hypothesized that high-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals would show higher convergent and divergent thinking than low-proficient bilinguals, with the differences being mediated by cognitive inhibition and cognitive flexibility, respectively. Chinese university students (N = 54) were classified as high-proficient (n = 27) and low-proficient (n = 27) bilinguals based on their performance on the National English Test for College Students. As expected, group comparisons showed that the high-proficient group had higher scores on the Remote Associates Test (RAT, convergent thinking) and the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT, divergent thinking). Also as expected, the association between bilingualism and convergent thinking was mediated by scores on a Stroop task (cognitive inhibition), and the association between bilingualism and divergent thinking was mediated by scores on a More-odd shifting task (cognitive flexibility). These findings suggest that bilingual learning can promote the development of different components of creativity through stronger cognitive inhibition and cognitive flexibility. The results provide empirical evidence for the relationship and mechanism between bilingual learning and creativity.

Editors' Introduction to Networks of the Mind: How Can Network Science Elucidate Our Understanding of Cognition?

Thinking is complex. Over the years, several types of methods and paradigms have developed across the psychological, cognitive, and neural sciences to study such complexity. A rapidly growing multidisciplinary quantitative field of network science offers quantitative methods to represent complex systems as networks, or graphs, and study the network properties of these systems. While the application of network science to study the brain has greatly advanced our understanding of the brains structure and function, the application of these tools to study cognition has been done to a much lesser account. This topic is a collection of papers that discuss the fruitfulness of applying network science to study cognition across a wide scope of research areas from generalist accounts of memory and encoding, to individual differences, to communities, and finally to cultural and individual change.