Lunch @UCBerkeley with Alison Gopnik – Are preschoolers smarter than college students?

Lunch @UCBerkeley with Alison Gopnik – Are preschoolers smarter than college students?

In the past 15 years, researchers have discovered that even young children are adept at inferring causal relationship. But are there differences in the ways that younger children, older children and adults learn? And do socioeconomic status and culture make a difference? Alison Gopnik will present several studies showing a surprising pattern. Not only can preschoolers learn abstract higher-order principles from data, but younger learners are actually better at inferring unusual or unlikely principles than older learners and adults. This pattern holds for children in Peru and in Head Start programs in Oakland, California. She relates this pattern to computational ideas about search and sampling, to evolutionary ideas about human life history, and to neuroscience findings about the negative effects of frontal control on wide exploration. Her hypothesis is that our distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search, exploration and creativity, before the demands of goal-directed action set in.

#babyscientists

Registration is required.