Lower engagement of cognitive control in children on ChatGPT

Abstract

Abstract Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can scaffold idea generation, but how it engages control, attention, and memory systems in the developing versus mature brain, and how this relates to creativity, remains unclear. We compared 6–7-yr-old children and adults during a naturalistic 5-min co-creative dialog with ChatGPT using the same prompt, in-scanner conversation, undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning and their dialogs were recorded. Functional connectivity was computed within and between seven large-scale networks: cingulo-opercular, default mode, memory retrieval, frontoparietal (FP), salience, ventral attention, and dorsal attention (DAN). Creativity scores, assessed outside of the scanner, did not differ between groups. Adults showed stronger within-network connectivity in control/attention systems, most robustly in FP, with additional effects in salience and DAN. Adults also exhibited greater cross-network integration, particularly FP-salience and FP-DAN couplings, alongside broader adult-greater effects among memory- and attention-related pairs. During a co-creative AI-assisted conversation, children exhibit a less coherent and integrated control–attention–memory architecture than adults. The combination of similar creativity scores with divergent neural profiles suggests that developmental differences in the implementation of creative cognition may be more pronounced than baseline capacity. This highlights FP-centric pathways and their salience-gated interactions as candidate substrates by which creativity supports goal-directed co-creative dialog with AI.