The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children<\/strong>, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces. The findings also build upon the researchers\u2019 efforts to use children\u2019s cognitive smarts to teach machines to learn in more human ways.<\/p>\n \u201cAs far as we know, this is the first study examining whether children can learn abstract cause and effect relationships, and comparing them to adults<\/strong>,\u201d said UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, senior author of the paper published online in the journal,\u00a0Cognition<\/em>.<\/p>\n Using a game they call \u201cBlickets,\u201d 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 \u2013 individually or in combination \u2013 could light up the box and play music. The shapes that activated the machine were called \u201cblickets.\u201d<\/p>\n What separated the young players from the adult players was their response to changing evidence in the blicket demonstrations<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d wrote Gopnik in her forthcoming column inThe Wall Street Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n Overall, the youngsters were more likely to entertain unlikely possibilities to figure out \u201cblicketness.\u201d\u00a0 This confirmed the researchers\u2019 hypothesis that preschoolers and kindergartners instinctively follow Bayesian logic<\/strong>, a statistical model that draws inferences by calculating the probability of possible outcomes.<\/p>\n \u201cOne big question, looking forward, is what makes children more flexible learners \u2014 are they just free from the preconceptions that adults have, or are they fundamentally more flexible or exploratory in how they see the world?<\/strong>\u201d said Christopher Lucas, lead author of the paper and a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. \u201cRegardless, children have a lot to teach us about learning.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Other co-authors of the study are Thomas Griffiths and Sophie Bridgers of the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the UC Berkeley media release: Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they\u2019re more flexible and less biased than… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[319,60,348],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16456,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16450\/revisions\/16456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"children](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/children_playground.jpg\")
<\/a>Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they\u2019re more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect<\/strong>, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh.<\/p>\n