Does your imagination change as you age?

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 to 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 In as-yet-unpublished work, commissioned by English Heritage, Nyhout and her colleagues asked visitors at Dover Castle how they might use various historical objects, including a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…