This article reviews developmental studies of creativity in children and adolescents with a focus on "peaks" and "slumps" that have often been described in the literature. The irregularity of the development of creativity is interpreted in light of conceptual and measurement issues and with regard to the interaction between individual-level resources, task-specific demands, and environmental influences, resulting in apparent individual differences in the development of creativity. The need for longitudinal designs, multidimensional and multi-domain assessment of creative potential limiting the contribution of task-specific factors is outlined and discussed as an important direction for developmental research on creativity.

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International audienceIt is increasingly acknowledged that creative potential involves partly a generalized ability, partly a set of domain-specific abilities, and partly a set of task-specific abilities. We extend and illustrate this view in a study of 482 children and adolescents, exploring the extent to which the scores variance of the Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC)'s eight subtests can be decomposed by five variance components: thinking-process general, thinking-process specific, domain-specific, task-specific, and measurement error. A structural equation model derived from an extension of the multi-trait multi-method matrix analysis revealed that (1) the contribution of each variance component depends greatly on the task under consideration, and that (2) the contribution of a general creative thinking-process factor is overall limited. This study outlines the multidimensional and hierarchical structure of creative potential and the need to measure it with comprehensive test batteries sampling a range of creative tasks, domains and creative thinking-modes