Are preschoolers more tech-savvy than college students?

Children are like sponges when it comes to learning. They absorb knowledge rapidly and readily assimilate information at lightning speeds. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Edinburgh have determined that because of their malleable minds, children can figure technology out more readily than adults. This is in part because adults think about the cause and effect when performing actions, while children live completely in the moment.

The skills of experimental learning and probabilistic reasoning generally come naturally to supple-minded children, especially since they’re practically handed an electronic device within minutes of entering this world. This research has also drawn upon children’s cognitive smarts that helps teach electronics to think more like people, developing more human-like reasoning skills. It is crucial to study children when developing higher technology, since baby brainpower is analyzed to be replicated in electronics.

In the online publication, Cognition , developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik at UC Berkeley explained, “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.”

To execute this experiment, a test group of 106 preschoolers and 170 college students were supervised while playing a game called “Blickets,” figuring out how the gadget worked. The preschoolers and college students stacked clay shapes on top of a red-topped box to see which widgets would light up the box and play music. All shapes, called “Blickets,” that fit perfectly helped start the machine.

Children were able to catch onto the rules of “Blickets” much quicker than the adult players. The college students tended to focus on the individual blocks that made the machine function, rather than looking for patterns. Gopnik stated, “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.”

The children were able to quickly calculate how to operate the machine, and stacking possibilities to make the gadget function properly. As per the researchers’ hypothesis, young minds follow Bayesian logic, which deduces information by calculating the likelihood of potential outcomes.

Researchers are still determining what makes children lither when learning new concepts and ideas. Is it that children are just naïve and innocent, uncorrupted from preconceived worldly notions, or perhaps that children approach the world in a more exploratory manner?  It will be interesting to observe the further investigations conducted by these researchers and how these conclusions will be applied to the future development of technology. 

Story via UC Berkeley