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The Influence of Episodic Memory on Creativity and its Prefrontal Correlates in Children and Adults

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Alexander W. D. McArthur¹ (), Madison B. Narciso¹, Margaret L. Schlichting¹; ¹University of Toronto

Past work suggests that people rely on memories for their experiences when generating novel ideas. In early life, this “divergent thinking” capacity emerges gradually alongside both the accumulation of experiences and age-related refinements to memory and cognitive control processes supported by the prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, little is known about how episodic memory and control interface to support creative cognition across development. Here, children (6-10 years, N=17) and adults (18-25 years, N=16) generated solutions to everyday problems (divergent thinking) while near-infrared spectroscopy was recorded from PFC. In one session, participants received an episodic memory induction previously shown to enhance creativity in adults (Madore et al., 2015), in which they recalled details about a previously presented video. In a separate session, participants received a control induction soliciting more general impressions. Behaviourally, adults but not children generated more ideas following the episodic induction, suggesting an orientation to memory enhances creativity in adults alone. Conversely, only children showed neural sensitivity to the manipulation: greater functional coordination within lateral PFC predicted improved idea generation in children following the episodic induction, suggesting that children may depend more than adults on control processes to effectively use episodic content when generating new ideas. Importantly, behavioural and neural effects of the episodic induction were specific to the divergent thinking task, not being observed in a matched “convergent thinking” task where participants selected the best solution from four options. Our findings suggest important developmental differences in the relationships among memory, control, and creativity in both brain and behaviour.

Topic Area: THINKING: Development & aging