Fostering creative minds has always been a premise to ensure adaptation to new challenges of human civilization. While some alternative educational settings (i.e., Montessori) were shown to nurture creative skills, it is unknown how they impact underlying brain mechanisms across the school years. This study assessed creative thinking and resting-state functional connectivity via fMRI in 75 children (4-18 y.o.) enrolled either in Montessori or traditional schools. We found that pedagogy significantly influenced creative performance and underlying brain networks. Replicating past work, Montessori-schooled children showed higher scores on creative thinking tests. Using static functional connectivity analysis, we found that Montessori-schooled children showed decreased within-network functional connectivity of the salience network. Moreover, using dynamic functional connectivity, we found that traditionally-schooled children spent more time in a brain state characterized by high intra-default mode network connectivity. These findings suggest that pedagogy may influence brain networks relevant to creative thinking-particularly the default and salience networks. Further research is needed, like a longitudinal study, to verify these results given the implications for educational practitioners. Research HighlightsMost executive jobs are prospected to be obsolete within several decades, so creative skills are seen as essential for the near future.School experience has been shown to play a role in creativity development, however, the underlying brain mechanisms remained under-investigated yet.Seventy-five 4-18 years-old children, from Montessori or traditional schools, performed a creativity task at the behavioral level, and a 6-min resting-state MR scan.We uniquely report preliminary evidence for the impact of pedagogy on functional brain networks.

Creativity has long been conceptually linked to experiences of emotion and mind wandering, yet these empirical relationships remain unclear, and few studies have explored the thoughts and emotions of creative people in daily life. To investigate how creativity relates to everyday cognitive and affective experiences, the present study (N = 159) used experience sampling to examine how creative cognition (divergent thinking ability) and creative behavior (self-reported creative activity and achievement) measured in the lab may predict thought content, affective state, and the frequency of mind wandering (i.e., task-unrelated thought) in daily life. Additionally, we assessed in-the-moment thoughts and emotions predictive of thinking about a creative project in everyday life (i.e., creative project thought ). We found that each form of creativity was generally associated with positively-valenced experiences, such as having pleasant thoughts, enjoying one's everyday activities, and feeling motivated and inspired. We also found that positive, activating emotions (happy and energetic) were positively associated with divergent thinking ability and in-the-moment creative project thought. Furthermore, positive, deactivating emotions (relaxed and connected) negatively predicted momentary creative project thought-indicating that positive affect can be tied to less creative thinking, depending on the activation level of emotions. No relationship was found between daily-life mind wandering frequency and divergent thinking ability or creative behavior/achievement, suggesting that the overall amount of task-unrelated thought in everyday life is not related to individual creativity. Taken together, the present findings provide novel evidence on the everyday experiential correlates of creative thinking and behavior.