Abstract: Adolescence is a critical stage in the development of creativity and brain maturation. Therefore, investigating the characteristics of creativity development in adolescent is meaningful for the cultivation of individual creative potential. Here, we summarized the progress of creativity development in adolescent, including the developmental trajectories, the influencing factors and the underlying brain mechanism. Previous researches showed that adolescent creative thinking abilities may undergo two development summits, which separately locate on the age group of 11-13 and 15-16; and different components of creative thinking (e.g., verbal creativity and visual creativity) exhibited different developmental trajectories. The development of creative thinking in different cultures is generally similar. But it is different in some specific components, which may be affected by different educational traditions. The influence factors of this development can be ascribed to both the external and internal environment. In terms of the external environment, the current researches focus on the impact of school environment and parenting pattern on the creativity development of adolescents. And with regards to the internal environment, the current researches focus on exploring how the factors such as cognitive ability, personality traits, emotional states, intrinsic motivations and the self-managements affect the creativity development during adolescence. In the aspect of brain mechanism, although there is a general believe that creativity is rely on functional interaction and integration of multiple brain regions, the prefrontal cortex may significantly affect the development of adolescent creativity by regulating cognitive control and modulating the function of primary brain regions. Furthermore, the prefrontal cortex is closely related to insight generation and divergent thinking in creative thinking process. Researchers initially explored the neural mechanism of creative thinking by using different creative tasks. With the rapid development of multimodal brain imaging technology, researchers began to explore the structural and functional characteristics of the brain associated with creativity from the perspective of individual differences. And through cross-sectional and longitudinal study, we can collect and establish a multimodal database of adolescent creativity (8-22 years old), including creative behaviors, related psychological assessments and multimodal neuroimaging data (structural data, resting-state functional data and diffusion tensor imaging data). This data set could provide important supports for future studies. We can better understand the neural mechanism of adolescent creativity development, investigate the critical period of creativity development and its related brain development by using this database. In addition, many researches already indicated that individuals’ creativity ability can be improved by various training methods such as brainstorming, meditation, sleep, positive emotion, walking (physical training), drawing curve and shifting perspectives. By using cognitive training and educational cultivation, including the Cognitive Stimulation Method, we hope to reveal the pathway and its related mechanism of brain plasticity, which can be used to effectively improve creative thinking abilities in adolescents. Therefore, training studies in how to improve adolescent’s creativity ability may become more and more important in the future.

Key words: adolescent, creativity, developmental trajectories, brain mechanism

摘要： 青少年时期是创造性发展的关阶段，探明青少年创造性发展规律及其神经机制对于培养和激发个体的创新潜能具有重要意义。本文综述了青少年创造性发展及其脑机制的研究进展，分别对青少年创造性思维发展趋势、影响因素及其相应的脑机制展开综述，并在此基础上进行了展望。总体而言，青少年时期创造性思维发展呈现出两个波峰（11-13岁，15-16岁）的发展趋势；青少年创造性发展受外部原生家庭教养方式和学校教师激励以及内部情绪动机和自我管理能力的影响较大；前额叶对青少年创造性发展具有重要作用，这可能与该脑区涉及执行控制功能有关。针对青少年创造性发展的教育干预以及大脑可塑性可能成为该领域的研究热点；而大样本纵向跟踪多模态脑影像数据库的建立可为相关研究提供重要支持。

关键词: 青少年, 创造性, 发展趋势, 神经机制