Bruce Rawlings

Creative cognition—the divergent and convergent thinking processes that generate and evaluate novel, useful ideas—is widely regarded as a key developmental skill, yet its relation to early adversity remains poorly understood. The hidden talents framework (HTF) proposes that harsh or unpredictable environments can selectively enhance adaptive cognitive abilities, but has largely overlooked creativity. In this article, we argue that this is a significant omission. Drawing on developmental, cognitive, and cultural evolutionary research, we suggest that creative cognition is theoretically relevant to HTF predictions yet empirically underexplored. We outline four possible influences linking adversity to creative cognition—cognitive flexibility, peer-mediated learning, resource-constrained problem solving, and multisystem resilience—that are situated at different levels of the developmental system, and consider how each might operate across childhood and adolescence. We highlight key gaps in measurement and theory, with implications for developmental science and equitable education.

Introduction: The capacity for cumulative culture depends on the interplay between social learning and innovation, yet the social-ecological factors that shape individual variation in these processes remain poorly understood. Children’s position within peer networks has been theorised to influence learning strategies by shaping exposure to social models and normative conformity pressures, but this prediction remains untested in experimental contexts. Methods: We tested whether children’s sociometric position predicted social learning and innovation across three complementary experimental tasks. 256 children aged 7–11 completed sociometric friendship nominations within their school classrooms and three tasks: the Multi-Method Box, a puzzlebox measuring learning strategy choice and innovation-by-modification; a tool innovation task, the hook task; and the Alternate Uses divergent thinking task. We derived three peer-nomination indices — out-degree, reciprocated friendships, and in-degree — and tested their associations with task performance using multilevel models controlling for age and classroom clustering. Results: Across all tasks and outcome measures, none of the sociometric indices predicted children’s learning strategy choice, imitation fidelity, innovation-by-modification, tool innovation success, solution method, or divergent thinking performance. In contrast, age consistently predicted innovation-related outcomes: older children produced more reward-exit and tool-entrance innovations on the Multi-Method Box, were more likely to solve the hook task and to use a hook rather than a dragging strategy, and generated more divergent thinking responses. These age effects replicated well-established developmental findings and held independently of children’s network position. Discussion: These findings suggest that individual-level dispositions and developmental cognitive gains may carry greater explanatory weight than relational embeddedness for micro-level learning decisions in middle childhood. Network structure may regulate the flow of cultural information across populations without determining the immediate learning strategy choices of individual children in individually administered experimental contexts.

The multifaceted relationship between play and innovation has long fascinated scholars across disciplines. Yet, we lack robust empirical evidence regarding the causal pathways that may connect these two behavioural concepts. While much work has revolved around how play might drive innovation in childhood, there has been little focus on how play might contribute to transformative societal innovation. Studies investigating play and innovation have taken a short-term synchronic perspective to innovation and have focused mainly on invention (i.e. the first instance of a novel behaviour), interested in how play might increase behavioural flexibility and problem-solving skills. Although these approaches cannot speak to population-level innovation (i.e. novel information that spreads across groups), evidence from such studies is often marshalled to support claims about the role of play for societal innovation dynamics over time. Here we propose that the link between play and population innovation has not been robustly demonstrated because of 1. a lack of precise specification of the causal pathways linking the two and 2. a mismatch between the scale on which play is measured and the scale on which population-level innovation operates. We narrow in on a specific kind of play (object play), a specific life history period (childhood), and a specific kind of innovation (population-level), and introduce a causal framework highlighting long-term processes to understand the state-of-the-art knowledge landscape and to guide future work. We synthesise three mechanistic pathways linking the children’s play and population-level innovation: exploration, development, and cultural evolution. We design formal causal diagrams that link children’s play and population-level innovation via the three mechanisms we identified, and consider potential confounds relevant to each. Our explicit long-term populational perspective on the link between play and innovation sheds light on productive means to move the field forward.

Humans possess learning biases that guide them to imitate individuals likely to hold adaptive information. One proposed bias—the age-based imitation bias—suggests that children preferentially imitate adults over peers because adults are presumed to have greater instrumental and conventional competence. Although supported by studies with young children from the post-industrialized west, this bias has not been examined across broader developmental ranges or diverse cultural contexts. Therefore, here we investigated adult versus peer imitation in 369 children aged 3–17 years from four communities: Congolese BaYaka, Congolese Bandongo, Scots, and Chinese Americans. Across instrumental and conventional tasks, we found no evidence that children preferentially imitated adults over peers. These null findings may reflect an existing publication bias in the social learning literature. They also raise the possibility that reported age-based effects may have been activated by the presence of other state- and model-based biases embedded within previous experiments.

The understanding of child development benefits from varied research approaches, including those that reflect the complexity of children's experiences across diverse and real‐world contexts. This article advocates for the broader use of naturalistic observations within developmental psychology, highlighting its unique value in capturing children's interactions within their social environments. Drawing on our recent experience of a naturalistic video observation study within culturally distinct communities, we provide extensive practical insights into the design and implementation of this methodology. We emphasise the importance of thoughtful planning at every stage of the research process and demonstrate how technological advancements advance observational methods. By sharing our practical reflections and strategies, we hope to support researchers to embrace naturalistic observation as a powerful method for generating rich, ecologically valid data to better understand developmental processes in real‐world settings.

Collective intelligence (CI) is the capacity of groups to outperform individuals in tasks such as decision-making, coordination and problem-solving. A significant challenge to studying CI is that it encompasses a wide variety of behaviours that are underpinned by different mechanisms. To balance inclusivity with conceptual clarity, we propose a typology of CI mechanisms including self-organized coordination, distributed decision-making, cooperative problem-solving, statistical aggregation and culture and cultural improvement. This typology helps clarify the minimum requirements for CI and how other, more cognitive complex mechanisms may have layered on top of these. As model comparative species, we focus on two ecologically successful generalists, rats (Rattus) and cockroaches (Blattodea). Cockroaches show evidence of collective behaviours, but these rely on a more ancestral set of mechanisms that lack cognitive complexity. Conversely, rats share important ecological traits with cockroaches but exhibit social traits found in primates, including cultural learning, distributed decision-making, empathy and cooperation. This comparison can show how similar collective outcomes can emerge even with disparate mechanisms and provide a way to uncover evolutionary design principles of CI. Ultimately, we can use such comparisons to determine which features of CI are universal properties of collectives and which are contingent on specific cognitive adaptations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The evolution of collective intelligence’.

Research on belief endorsement typically estimates an average mean value to describe all individuals even though groups of individuals can have coexisting beliefs within the mind. This study employed a person-centered approach based on latent profile analysis (LPA) to investigate within- and between-population variation in the endorsement patterns of multiple explanations for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, including zoonotic, human-made, and supernatural explanations, across eleven countries. Results revealed seven latent profiles that varied in the number and type of explanations endorsed, as well as the degree of certainty associated with each. Among demographic characteristics, political orientation and religious affiliation predict whether particular types of explanations are endorsed or rejected. Latent profiles characterized by explanatory uncertainty and endorsement of conspiratorial explanations were less likely to wear masks and vaccinate. We discuss the implications of person-centered analytical approaches for documenting variation in explanation endorsement and as predictors of behavioral health outcomes.

Peer review is central to the credibility and advancement of science. We outline the anatomy of a constructive peer review in developmental psychology, highlighting key features such as clarity, structure, consistency, specificity, constructiveness, vigilance against bias, integrity, relevance, timeliness, and place-centeredness. We synthesize practical guidance for reviewers, including considerations surrounding the responsible use of AI in peer review. Although relevant to reviewers at all career stages, this editorial is oriented toward early-career scholars and first-time reviewers. The proposed practices position peer review as a tool for both assuring quality and diversification of perspective within developmental science. This editorial serves as a resource for the broader discipline and not as a journal policy statement.