The present study examined the divergent thinking (DT) processes of four-year-old children. Following a similar approach used in a study with adults, children were encouraged to report on their thinking processes through interactive dialogues while performing a widely used DT task, the Alternative Uses Task (AUT). Content analysis of children’s utterances revealed that children generated uses mostly based on automatic, bottom-up associative processes and occasionally based on effortful, top-down executive processes. Using (multilevel) regression analysis, we found that (1) both associative and executive DT processes predicted children’s fluency scores on the AUT, whilst only the executive DT process Performing mental operations on the stimulus uniquely predicted originality; (2) children at the age of four years already showed a serial order effect in the originality of their responses, indicating that the originality of uses increased the later a particular use was generated in the series of mentioned uses; and (3) similar serial order effects characterized the occurrence of executive processes. These results suggest that increasing originality depends on increasing involvement of effortful executive processes. Especially the executive process of mentally isolating properties or parts of objects and the subsequent recombination of these parts and properties into a new structured whole might be a key characteristic of DT to generate original ideas.

本研究检查了四岁儿童的发散思维（DT）过程。在与成年人进行的研究中采用了类似的方法之后，鼓励儿童通过互动对话报告他们的思维过程，同时执行广泛使用的DT任务，即替代用途任务（AUT）。对儿童话语的内容分析表明，儿童产生的使用主要基于自动的，自下而上的关联过程，偶尔基于努力的，自上而下的执行过程。使用（多级）回归分析，我们发现（1）关联和执行DT过程都可以预测孩子在AUT上的流利度得分，而只有执行DT过程可以对刺激进行心理操作独特预测的原创性；（2）四岁的儿童在其回应的原创性上已经表现出一系列有序的效果，表明使用的原创性在上述一系列使用中产生了特定的使用时增加了；（3）类似的序列顺序效应表征了执行过程的发生。这些结果表明，增加原创性取决于增加努力的执行流程的投入。尤其是在精神上隔离对象的属性或部分的执行过程，以及随后将这些部分和属性重新组合为新的结构化整体的执行过程，可能是DT产生原创思想的关键特征。