How amazing are preschoolers? They may not have the
knowledge that we do, butmaybe their flexible thinking
processes could teach us a thing or two… (from ScienceDaily.com)
Preschoolers can outsmart college
students at figuring out gizmos
Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figurin
g out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they’re
more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about
cause and effect, according to new research from the
University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh.
“As far as we know, this is the first study examining whether
children can learn abstract cause and effect relationships, and
comparing them to adults,” said UC Berkeley developmental
psychologist Alison Gopnik, senior author of the paper published online in the journal, Cognition.
Using a game they call “Blickets,” the researchers looked at
how 106 preschoolers (aged 4 and 5) and 170 college
undergrads figured out a gizmo that works in an unusual way.
They did this by placing clay shapes (cubes, pyramids,
cylinders, etc), on a red-topped box to see which of the widgets
— individually or in combination — could light up the box and play
music. The shapes that activated the machine were called “blickets.”
What separated the young players from the adult players was their
response to changing evidence in the blicket demonstrations. For
example, unusual combinations could make the machine go, and
children caught on to that rule, while the adults tended to focus
on which individual blocks activated the machine even in the
face of changing evidence.
“The kids got it. They figured out that the machine might work
in this unusual wayand so that you should put both blocks on
together. But the best and brightest students acted as if the machine
would always follow the common and obvious rule, even when
we showed them that it might work differently,” wrote Gopnik
in her forthcoming column in The Wall Street Journal.
Overall, the youngsters were more likely to entertain unlikely
possibilities to figure out “blicketness.” This confirmed the
researchers’ hypothesis that preschoolers and kindergartners
instinctively follow Bayesian logic, a statistical model that draws
inferences by calculating the probability of possible outcomes.
“One big question, looking forward, is what makes children more
flexible learners — are they just free from the preconceptions
that adults have, or are they fundamentally more flexible or
exploratory in how they see the world?” said Christopher Lucas,
lead author of the paper and a lecturer at the University of
Edinburgh. “Regardless, children have a lot to teach us about learning.”