Spontaneous discovery of novel task solutions in children
- 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.
Author: | Nicolas SchuckORCiDGND, Amy X. Li, Dorit WenkeORCiDGND, Destina Sevde Ay-BrysonORCiDGND, Anika T. Loewe, Robert GaschlerORCiDGND, Yee Lee ShingORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-627033 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266253 |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 |
Parent Title (English): | PLOS ONE |
Publisher: | PLOS |
Place of publication: | San Francisco, California, US |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2022/05/31 |
Date of first Publication: | 2022/05/31 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2022/07/26 |
Volume: | 17.2022 |
Issue: | 5, art. e0266253 |
Article Number: | e0266253 |
Page Number: | 18 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 18 |
Note: | 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. |
Note: | 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. |
HeBIS-PPN: | 50233715X |
Institutes: | Psychologie und Sportwissenschaften |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Open-Access-Publikationsfonds: | Psychologie und Sportwissenschaften |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |