A variety of new UC Berkeley research on babies and young children is revealing how well and how early in life humans are able to perform complicated thinking tasks, sometimes better than computers. In fact, scientists are even trying to develop computer programs that can mimic what's going on in babies' brains. Prof. Alison Gopnik, Prof. Fei Xu, Prof. Thomas Griffiths, and graduate students Sophie Bridgers, Stephanie Denison, and Caren Walker discuss their work. (Video by Roxanne Majasdjian and Philip Ebiner.) |
Preschoolers Outsmart College Students at Figuring out Gizmos
BERKELEY; March 6, 2014—Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring 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.
A new study shows children can sometimes outsmart grownups when it comes to figuring out how gadgets work because they’re less biased in their ideas about cause and effect.
The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces. The findings also build upon the researchers’ efforts to use children’s cognitive smarts to teach machines to learn in more human ways.
“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 way and 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.”
YASMIN ANWAR
ARTICLE:
“When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: Developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships,” Christopher G. Lucas, Sophie Bridgers, Thomas L. Griffiths, Alison Gopnik. Cognition, Volume 131, Issue 2, May 2014, Pages 284–299.
