Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; The University of Sydney, School of Psychology, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; The University of Sydney, Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney, NSW 2050, Australia.
Early Cognitive Development Centre, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
Curr Biol. 2020 Sep 7;30(17):3457-3464.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.06.035. Epub 2020 Jul 9.
From maps sketched in sand to supercomputing software, humans ubiquitously enhance cognitive performance by creating and using artifacts that bear mental load [1-5]. This extension of information processing into the environment has taken center stage in debates about the nature of cognition in humans and other animals [6-9]. How does the human mind acquire such strategies? In two experiments, we investigated the developmental origins of cognitive offloading in 150 children aged between 4 and 11 years. We created a memory task in which children were required to recall the location of hidden targets. In one experiment, participants were provided with a pre-specified cognitive offloading opportunity: an option to mark the target locations with tokens during the hiding period. Even 4-year-old children quickly adopted this external strategy and, in line with a metacognitive account, children across ages offloaded more often when the task was more difficult. In a second experiment, we provided children with the means to devise their own cognitive offloading strategy. Very few younger children spontaneously devised a solution, but by ages 10 and 11, nearly all did so. In a follow-up test phase, a simple prompt greatly increased the rate at which the younger children devised an offloading strategy. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the difficulties of thinking arises early in development and improves throughout the early school years, with children learning to modify the world around them to compensate for their cognitive limits.
从沙地上的草图到超级计算软件，人类通过创造和使用承载心智负担的人工制品来普遍增强认知表现[1-5]。这种将信息处理扩展到环境中的做法已经成为人类和其他动物认知本质争论的焦点[6-9]。人类的思维是如何获得这些策略的呢？在两项实验中，我们调查了认知卸载的发展起源，研究对象是 150 名年龄在 4 至 11 岁之间的儿童。我们设计了一个记忆任务，要求孩子们回忆隐藏目标的位置。在一个实验中，参与者获得了一个预先指定的认知卸载机会：在隐藏期间用代币标记目标位置的选项。即使是 4 岁的儿童也很快采用了这种外部策略，并且与元认知解释一致，随着任务难度的增加，所有年龄段的儿童都更频繁地进行了外部策略的使用。在第二个实验中，我们为孩子们提供了设计自己的认知卸载策略的手段。很少有年幼的孩子自发地想出解决方案，但到了 10 岁和 11 岁，几乎所有的孩子都想出了方案。在后续的测试阶段，一个简单的提示大大提高了年幼孩子设计外部策略的速度。这些发现表明，对思维困难的敏感性在发展早期就出现了，并在整个小学阶段得到了提高，儿童学会了改变周围的世界来弥补认知上的限制。
