TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schuck, Nicolas
A1  - Li, Amy X.
A1  - Wenke, Dorit
A1  - Ay-Bryson, Destina Sevde
A1  - Loewe, Anika T.
A1  - Gaschler, Robert
A1  - Shing, Yee Lee
T1  - Spontaneous discovery of novel task solutions in children
T2  - PLOS ONE
N2  - Children often perform worse than adults on tasks that require focused attention. While this is commonly regarded as a sign of incomplete cognitive development, a broader attentional focus could also endow children with the ability to find novel solutions to a given task. To test this idea, we investigated children’s ability to discover and use novel aspects of the environment that allowed them to improve their decision-making strategy. Participants were given a simple choice task in which the possibility of strategy improvement was neither mentioned by instructions nor encouraged by explicit error feedback. Among 47 children (8—10 years of age) who were instructed to perform the choice task across two experiments, 27.5% showed a full strategy change. This closely matched the proportion of adults who had the same insight (28.2% of n = 39). The amount of erroneous choices, working memory capacity and inhibitory control, in contrast, indicated substantial disadvantages of children in task execution and cognitive control. A task difficulty manipulation did not affect the results. The stark contrast between age-differences in different aspects of cognitive performance might offer a unique opportunity for educators in fostering learning in children.
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62703
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627033
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - NWS was funded by an Independent Max Planck Research Group grant awarded by the Max Planck Society (M.TN.A.BILD0004, www.mpg.de) and a Starting Grant from the European Union (ERC-StG-REPLAY-852669, www.erc.europa.eu/). DW was funded by DFG grant (WE2852/3-1, www.dfg.de). YLS was funded by a Minerva Research Group by the Max Planck Society (www.mpg.de), a Starting Grant from the European Union (ERC-StG-PIVOTAL-758898, www.erc.europa.eu), and a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2018-2020, www.jacobsfoundation.org). AL is supported by the International Max Planck Research School on Computational Methods in Psychiatry and Ageing Research (IMPRS COMPPPSYCH, www.mps.ucl-centre.mpg.de). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
N1  - Anonymized data and code used to generate all results are publicly available on github https://github.com/nschuck/Schucketal_PLoSONE_2022, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6481202.
VL  - 17.2022
IS  - 5, art. e0266253
SP  - 1
EP  - 18
PB  - PLOS
CY  - San Francisco, California, US
ER  -