Creativity and Flexibility in Young Children’s use of External Cognitive Strategies

• In Event: Scaffolding the Development of Successful Learning Across Early and Middle Childhood

Abstract

A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the metacognitive awareness of our cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw on this awareness to offload cognitive demand into the environment. We write lists and set reminders instead of relying on our memory, use calculators to solve difficult mathematical problems, and employ maps and GPS devices to aid navigation. Across two studies, we show that even 4- and 5-year-olds can (i) use metacognitive knowledge of their cognitive limits to independently devise external cognitive strategies, (ii) spontaneously transfer these strategies to novel contexts, and (iii) adapt them in accordance with changing task parameters.

In Study 1, 3- to 5-year-olds completed a novel search task in which they were unlikely to perform optimally across trials without setting external reminders about the location of a target. Children watched an experimenter hide a target in one of three identical opaque containers. The containers were then shuffled out of view before children had to guess where the target was hidden (Figure 1, Phase 1). Children were then shown how to externally mark the containers prior to shuffling to help them retrieve the reward after shuffling. Some children were taught the most effective external strategy (Figure 1, target-marked training) and were simply able to copy this strategy to perform optimally across test trials. Other children were taught a less effective external strategy (Figure 1, empty-marked training) and could only optimise their performance by (i) recognising that the demonstrated external strategy was suboptimal, and (ii) spontaneously devising the most effective external strategy themselves. Children of all ages used the most effective strategy above chance levels if they had seen it demonstrated to them (binomial tests, ps < .001), but only 4- and 5-year-olds (ps < .001), but not 3-year-olds (p = .189) could independently devise this strategy to improve their future performance.

In Study 2, 3- to 8-year-olds completed the target-marked training task, where they learnt to add a marker to the rewarded container before shuffling, and the test phase as in Study 1. Children who used this strategy were then introduced to a transfer task, which was structurally distinct from the original task but with the same underlying conceptual demands. Here, all three containers were marked, so children instead needed to remove or rearrange the markers to successfully differentiate the rewarded container. Although most 3-year-olds copied the demonstrated strategy in the initial test phase, none of these children devised any novel strategies in the transfer task. By contrast, 4-year-olds were, on average, already devising more than one previously unseen strategy across the six transfer trials (examples in Figure 2, Panel A). From age 6, children used effective strategies on the majority of trials, and age was positively correlated with the use of all three categories of effective strategies, rs > .261, ps < .001 (Figure 2, Panels B and C). These results capture pronounced developmental changes in the creativity and flexibility of children’s external cognitive strategy use and point to marked individual differences in the strategies children devise.

Authors

• Kristy Louise Armitage, University of Queensland
  Presenting Author

• Alex Taylor

• Thomas Suddendorf, University of Queensland

• Jonathan Redshaw, University of Queensland