神马文学网Op-Ed Contributor - Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
来源：百度文库 编辑：神马文学网 时间：2024/04/30 02:39:54
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
Berkeley, Calif.
GENERATIONS of psychologistsand philosophers have believed that babies and young children werebasically defective adults — irrational, egocentric and unable to thinklogically. The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blankslate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a“blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies andyoung children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.
Newstudies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know,observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever havethought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Threerecent experiments show that even the youngest children havesophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu andVashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babiescould understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a boxfull of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red onesmixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and moreintently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ballwere taken out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — thanwhen four white balls and a red one were produced.
In 2007,Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated thatwhen young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect.Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duckand a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressedone lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppetpopped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both leversat once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to seewhat the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causalrelation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then theexperimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children inthe first group played with the toy much less than the children in thesecond group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked,they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in thesecond group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playingaround, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab atBerkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can useprobabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imaginenew possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machinerepeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machinelight up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of threetimes; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Thenwe gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine.These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely toput the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on themachine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead ofputting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up overthe machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block actthis way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think itcould. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine thepeculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishingcapacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery andprobabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about theparticular objects and people surrounding them.
Sadly, someparents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments andconclude that they need programs and products that will make theirbabies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learnin a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children inacademic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognizethe alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urgepreschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specificskills.
But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different fromthat of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivatein school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We setobjectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills theyshould acquire or information they should know. Children take tests toprove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts andhave not been distracted by other possibilities.
Thisapproach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies andvery young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precisegoals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we reallymean that they can’t not pay attention:they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all therest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the newresearch tells us that babies can be rational without beinggoal-oriented.
Babies are captivated by the most unexpectedevents. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are themost relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw avideo of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimentertold them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midstof this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle ofthe video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’teven seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.
Adults focus onobjects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever studydemonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them themost. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based onjust a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babiesaren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead,they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Partof the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in thebrain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains workbecause neurons are connected to one another, allowing them tocommunicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adultbrains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away theconnections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and moreautomatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain thatcontrols the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, isexceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape untilour early 20s.
In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities.As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilitiesbecome much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions basedon this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to givethose ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk aboutthe difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learnmore if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effectiveif it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adultsexploit.
Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks.Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lockin what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities.We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies andyoung children are designed to explore, and they should be encouragedto do so.
The learning that babies and young children do on theirown, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw newconclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imaginedifferent ways that the world might be, is very different fromschoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world aroundthem through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, fromdolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones andcomputers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the waysbowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone.(Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)
Butwhat children observe most closely, explore most obsessively andimagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfecttoys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teachyoung children by paying attention and interacting with them naturallyand, most of all, by just allowing them to play.