Toddlers understand the concept of opportunity

Children too young to know words like “impossible” and “improbable” nevertheless understand how opportunity works and find new jobs with 2- and 3-year-olds.

The study was the first to demonstrate that young children differentiate between improbable and impossible events and learn significantly better after impossible events. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Even young children already think about the world in terms of possibilities,” the co-author said. Lisa Feigensonco-director Johns Hopkins University Child Development Laboratory. “Adults do this all the time, and we wanted to know whether even toddlers think about possible states of the world before they have years of experience and language to describe those mental states.”

Adults consider possibilities every day. Chance of rain? It is best to take an umbrella with you. If I buy a lottery ticket, will I win? Probably not. But it was unknown whether toddlers practice the same mental judgment or whether it emerges with age and experience.

Children two and three years old were shown a chewing gum-shaped machine filled with toys. Some children saw a mixture of pink and purple toys. Others saw that the car was filled with only purple toys. Then the children were asked to throw a coin into the machine and draw one toy.

Children who saw a mixture of pink and purple toys available and drew a pink one should not have been surprised, because even if there weren’t many pink toys (and even if there was only one pink one), there were some. chance that they will receive a pink toy. But some children who saw a machine filled only with purple toys received pink ones, which was impossible.

After they received their toys, all children were told the name of the toy (a made up word) and then after a while they were asked what it was called. Children who were faced with an impossible scenario and drew a pink toy, even though there were no pink toys in the car, learned significantly better than everyone else. But while there was the possibility of getting a pink toy, no matter how unlikely it was, the children had no incentive to learn.

“One possibility was that they might learn well from improbable events, but even better from impossible events,” said co-author Aimee Stahl, a former graduate student in Feigenson’s lab and now an assistant professor of psychology at the College of New York. Jersey. “But we found that they don’t actually learn from low-probability, improbable events. They only learn if they experience an impossible event.”

Feigenson and Stahl believe that babies learn much better after impossible events because surprises force them to seek explanations. Incredible events may be surprising, but they don’t necessarily need explanation. Impossible events require children to reevaluate what they thought they knew.

“These results are very interesting because they show that when children see events in the world that they cannot explain, it instills in them a desire for information that they can use to reconcile their previous model of the world with what they only what they saw.” saw it,” Feigenson said. “From a scientific perspective, these findings are interesting because they suggest that people are able to think about whether things are possible, unlikely, or simply cannot happen right from the start.”

Next, the researchers plan to explore how this desire for explanation can be used in the classroom. The results show that parents and teachers can create moments that promote learning for children.

“Parents and educators can provide opportunities for kids to really unravel something they find mysterious and offer a really powerful learning moment,” Feigenson said.