Toddlers May Learn So Fast Because They Work Like Scientists

Alison Gopnik calls very young children "the best learners in the universe," and most of them cannot yet tie their shoes. Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies how young minds learn, says we do not really know how they pick up so much in such a short time, but researchers are starting to get some clues.

One idea that may help explain it, she says, is that children use many of the same methods that grown-up researchers use. They build working ideas about how ordinary things work, covering objects, people, and words, and then they test those ideas through everyday exploration and play.

That testing is what adults call getting into everything, in Gopnik's phrase. She says that in the course of that exploration and play, children work out which actions and objects bring about which effects.

In work in her lab, she says, children took fairly complicated patterns of evidence about what happened together and used those patterns to sort out causes. Gopnik calls that ability to sort out causes from data "one of the really basic deep fundamental pillars of science."

In more recent work, she says, children in some cases did better than adults. When four-year-olds and college students faced a problem with an unusual or unlikely answer, the children were more likely to reach that unlikely answer.

One idea that ties this together is Gopnik's working hypothesis that children may be built to work this way. They propose an idea about how things work, try it out by playing with the world, and then change the idea based on what happens next.