A new study found that youngsters learn better than adults because they explore more than adults.
According to the study, when people try something new and have a negative experience, they are less inclined to try it again.
“That may appear to be the most fundamental type of intelligence—even rats avoid a path that leads to a shock,” said Dr. Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, one of the study’s co-authors.
“We will never learn that the world is more complicated than that,” she said, if adults reject new ideas immediately after experiencing a negative outcome.
According to the study, youngsters have a strong curiosity and drive to explore, which helps them to learn so many new things in such a short period of time.
She collaborated with NYU cognitive scientist Emily Liquin on a study to examine if young children’s drive to explore more than adults affects the way they learn.
They gave 64 young children (ages four and five) and 87 adults a game in which they placed different blocks on a machine with one rule: if the machine lights up, they receive a prize consisting of a star, but if it doesn’t, they lose twice as much.
The goal of the game was to discover that all of the blocks worked except those with white spots (in other words, the ones with black spots were fine).
The majority of the youngsters correctly identified the rule, although more than 70% of adults did not, but it came at a cost: The children were given fewer stars.
She refers to it as a “learning trap” experiment, and it demonstrates that adults tend to leap to conclusions too fast, whereas children are more willing to research and absorb more information before making a judgment.
According to the article, the study has a significant limitation in that it only compared four to seven-year-olds to adults in the United States. Because cultural differences may also influence how children learn, further research is needed to generalize it to a larger population and situation.
“We adults are frequently so quick to exploit that we don’t explore, so afraid of losing stars that we miss out on learning something new,” Gopnik explains.
“Children, on the other hand, are natural explorers willing to give up stars for the sake of knowledge. Both ways of thinking are necessary for life, but we adults could learn a thing or two from those insatiably curious kids “She went on.
Leave a Reply