At the end of May, about 68 thousand high school graduates in Greece took the Panhellenic Exams to qualify for a scholarship in higher education. The exam committee chose among the topics a report on CEU CDC researchers’ thought-provoking discovery to probe the students’ comprehension and writing skills. In a study published last summer in PNAS - one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world -, Barbara Pomiechowska, Ágnes Melinda Kovács, Ernő Téglás and Gábor Bródy argued that abstract combinatorial skills emerge much earlier in development than we previously thought: already in the first year of life. These capabilities are the foundation of generative thinking: new ideas are born when we combine existing concepts in a novel way. The team’s intriguing results give an insight into the roots of human creativity and its unparalleled achievements.
The research group used an inventive design and sophisticated eye-tracking technology to show that 12-month-old babies can already understand novel combinations of words. To ensure that the participants have never heard the test words together before, the scientists first taught babies two new labels for “one” and “two” (e.g. mize and padu). Then they checked whether the infants could find the match for complex phrases such as “padu duck” among four different images: a kind distractor (e.g. one duck), a number distractor (e.g. two balls), a mixed set (e.g. a duck and a ball) and the correct match (two ducks). Babies looked longest at the set satisfying both the number and the kind criteria. What’s more, they even combined the two concepts in an adult-like manner and expected that “padu” should behave like “two” and apply to a homogenous set of items: they also looked longer at pairs of the labelled object than at mixed sets.
Babies’ readiness to interpret novel combinations of concepts is the foundation of creative thinking later in life, but it could also play a crucial role in language development. This result might change the way we think about young babies – and with the Panhellenic Exams, now it has reached an incredibly wide audience of young people all over Greece.
Original paper: Pomiechowska, B., Bródy, G., Téglás, E., & Kovács, Á. M. (2024b). Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(29). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2315149121