Max Planck Research Group NeuroCode, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 May 31;17(5):e0266253. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266253. eCollection 2022.
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.
儿童在需要集中注意力的任务上的表现往往不如成人。虽然这通常被认为是认知发展不完全的标志，但更广泛的注意力焦点也可能使儿童能够找到解决给定任务的新方法。为了检验这一观点，我们研究了儿童发现和利用新环境方面的能力，这些方面使他们能够改进自己的决策策略。参与者被要求在一个简单的选择任务中执行，该任务的说明中既没有提到策略改进的可能性，也没有通过明确的错误反馈来鼓励。在两个实验中被指示执行选择任务的 47 名儿童（8-10 岁）中，有 27.5%的人完全改变了策略。这与具有相同洞察力的成年人的比例（39 人中有 28.2%）非常匹配。相比之下，错误选择的数量、工作记忆容量和抑制控制表明，儿童在执行任务和认知控制方面存在很大的劣势。任务难度的操作并没有影响结果。认知表现不同方面的年龄差异形成鲜明对比，这可能为教育工作者在培养儿童学习方面提供了独特的机会。
