Preschoolers’ Innate Knowledge Means They Can Probably Do Algebra

TIME:

Give a three-year old a smartphone and she’ll likely figure out how to turn it on and operate a few simple functions. But confront her with an algebra problem and ask her to solve for x? Not likely.

For decades, child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget convinced us that young, undeveloped minds couldn’t handle complex concepts because they simply weren’t experienced or mature enough yet. Piaget, in fact, believed that toddlers could not understand cause and effect, that they couldn’t think logically, and that they also couldn’t handle abstract ideas.

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Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at University of California Berkeley and her team devised a way to test how well young kids understand the abstract concept of multiple causality — the idea that there may be more than one cause for a single effect. They pitted 32 preschoolers around 4 years old against 143 undergrads. The study centered around a toy that could be turned on by placing a single blue-colored block on the toy’s tray, but could also be activated if two blocks of different colors – orange and purple – were placed on the tray. Both the kids and the undergraduates were shown how the toy worked and then asked which blocks activated the toy.

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