Creativity and Flexibility in Young Children's Use of External Cognitive Strategies.
A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3–8-year-olds (N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, m...
| Publicado en: | Developmental Psychology Vol. 59; no. 6; pp. 995 - 1006 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
| Publicado: |
American Psychological Association
Jun2023
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=163802438&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 163802438 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00121649 DPS jtl: Developmental Psychology issn: 00121649 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2023 vid: 59 iid: 6 pid: 34 pub: American Psychological Association artinfo: ui: 163802438 10.1037/dev0001562 ppf: 995 ppct: 11 formats: tig: atl: Creativity and Flexibility in Young Children's Use of External Cognitive Strategies. aug: au: Armitage, Kristy L. Suddendorf, Thomas Bulley, Adam Bastos, Amalia P. M. Taylor, Alex H. Redshaw, Jonathan affil: School of Psychology, The University of Queensland Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney Department of Psychology, Harvard University School of Psychology, The University of Sydney Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego School of Psychology, The University of Auckland ICREA, Barcelona, Spain Institut de Neurociències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona su: Australia Memory Age distribution Creative ability Cognition Task performance White people Cognitive flexibility sug: subj: Memory Age distribution Creative ability Cognition Task performance White people Australia Cognitive flexibility keyword: cognitive offloading metacognition problem solving reminder setting strategy selection cognitive offloading metacognition problem solving reminder setting strategy selection ab: A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3–8-year-olds (N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external metacognitive strategy and transfer it across contexts. Children watched as an experimenter demonstrated how to mark the location of a hidden prize, thus helping them successfully retrieve that prize in the future. Children were then given the opportunity to spontaneously adopt an external marking strategy across six test trials. Children who did so at least once were then introduced to a conceptually similar but structurally distinct transfer task. Although most 3-year-olds deployed the demonstrated strategy in the initial test phase, none of them modified that strategy to solve the transfer task. By contrast, many children aged 4 years and older spontaneously devised more than one previously unseen reminder-setting strategy across the six transfer trials, with this tendency increasing with age. From age 6, children deployed effective external strategies on most trials, with the number, combination, and order of unique strategies used varying widely both within and across the older age groups. These results demonstrate young children's remarkable flexibility in the transferral of external strategies across contexts and point to pronounced individual differences in the strategies children devise. Public Significance Statement: We investigated whether 3–8-year-old children could adopt a reminder-setting strategy to help them find and retrieve a hidden prize and then, without any prompting, transfer the logic behind the strategy to solve a related problem in a novel context. From age 4, children were using previously unseen reminder-setting strategies in the transfer task that followed the same logic as the initial task, with this tendency increasing markedly with age. The number, combination, and order of strategies used varied widely both within and across age groups, indicating remarkable creativity and flexibility in children's external strategy use. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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