New Scientist
Imagination doesn’t fade with age—it transforms. While children offer wild, rule-breaking ideas, adults develop creative depth and purpose through experience. Older minds prioritize meaning over detail and generate more practical innovations, while younger ones think more flexibly. Together, their strengths complement each other in solving complex problems.
Your imagination doesn’t get worse as you age – but it does change
Author: Michael Marshall
AS CHILDREN grow into adulthood and then continue ageing, what happens to their imagination? Do all of us gradually lose our innate capacity to conjure up novelty amid the drudgery of life, or does experience teach us to fine-tune it? Paul Harris, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University, has argued that imagination gets better with age, stating in a 2021 review that young children’s pretend play generally sticks to “everyday regularities”; only later do they start imagining dramatic counterfactuals. In particular, Harris points to an apparent shift around the age of 4, when children start to be able to imagine two mutually incompatible possible outcomes for an event.
This is supported by studies showing that children often fail creative tasks that adults pass. In one such test, participants are asked to retrieve a handled bucket. To do this, they are given a straight pipe cleaner. The solution is to bend it into a hook, but children younger than 5 rarely figure this out.
Angela Nyhout, a developmental psychologist at the University of Kent, UK, has been working on understanding how our imagination might shift with age. In as-yet-unpublished work, commissioned by English Heritage, Nyhout and her colleagues asked visitors at Dover Castle, UK, how they might use various historical objects, including a mould in the shape of a warrior god and a dress fastener. “Older adults came up with more creative possibilities than younger adults,” she says.
That tracks with the work of Andrew Shtulman, a cognitive developmental psychologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles, who argued in his 2023 book Learning to Imagine that imagination is a skill that we develop with practice.
The idea that imagination increases in line with the number of candles on your birthday cake isn’t uniformly accepted, however. Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has conducted research indicating that children are more open-minded than adults. This is because they know less about the world, says Nyhout: “They don’t really have a very strong expectation [of what might happen], so they’re more likely to explore a number of different spaces.”
What does seem to be true is that our imagination evolves. Nyhout’s team has experimented by asking children in different age brackets how problems from stories could be resolved. In one, a child sits on his front porch drawing, then goes inside to get some juice – only for the wind to blow his drawings away. While older children often say the boy should have brought his drawings inside, preschoolers sometimes come up with out-of-left-field – and more imaginative – ideas like “the wind shouldn’t have blown”.
THE CHILD’S IMAGINATION MIGHT BE OPTIMAL IN SOME SETTINGS AND INADEQUATE IN OTHERS
What’s more, in her study at Dover Castle, she found that “young adults and adolescents seem to be a bit more flexible in their thinking”, says Nyhout. While older adults envisioned more ways that an object could be used, they generally stuck to the same domain, such as “kitchen”, whereas younger adults roamed more widely.
Nothing exemplifies these contradictions more than studies of people’s mental imagery. There is evidence that our visual imagery becomes less vivid as we get older. However, this seems to reflect changes in what we prioritise when we imagine things. “Typical older adults are less likely to zoom in and remember the very specific details that make up a past event,” says Jessica Andrews-Hanna, a cognitive scientist at the University of Arizona. Instead, they focus on “the overall gist of the memories”, she says, especially their meaning and significance.
Viewed negatively, “our memories, our ability to remember the details, fade as we get older”, says Andrews-Hanna. However, “maybe that’s not a bad thing”. Instead of fixating on details, “we may want to access our experiences at the level of meaning”, she says.
“I think it’s clear that our imaginations have different features at different ages,” says Nyhout – but that doesn’t mean it gets better or worse. “The child’s imagination might be optimal in some settings and inadequate in others, and vice versa,” she says. “Because of these differences, collaboration across ages might help us to come up with solutions to pressing problems, like reducing inequality or sustainable development.”
Credits: TCA, LLC.