Young Minds, Smart Strategies: How Children Decide When to Use External Memory Aids

Do young children prefer to rely on their memory, or do they take the easier route and use external aids like lists and reminders? How do they decide when to put in the mental effort and when to lean on available tools? 

In this episode of Under the Cortex, host Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum teams up with Zsuzsa Kaldy from the University of Massachusetts Boston. They discuss Kaldy’s study published in APS’s journal Psychological Science addressing how children balance memory with external help. The conversation evolves into what these findings reveal about cognitive development, and cultural differences in learning. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at underthecortex@psychologicalscience.org 

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:09.040] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

When should we rely on our memory, and when is it better to use external tools like notes or reminders? Do children naturally understand this trade-off, or do they just use whatever is easiest? And how do cultural differences shape the way children learn to manage their mental resources? This is under the cortex I am Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. Joining me is Zsuzsa Kaldy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, whose recent article on this topic was published in APS’s journal, Psychological Science. Together, we will examine how children between the ages of five and eight play a shopping game to test their memory trade-offs and what this reveals about their memory skills and cognitive development. Zsuzsa, thank you for joining me today. Welcome to Under the Cortex. 

[00:01:04.690] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Thank you, Ozge, for this opportunity. 

[00:01:06.890] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, we are very happy that you are here. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? What type of psychologist are you? 

[00:01:14.720] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Yeah, I was born in Hungary. I came to the US as a student. I did my graduate work at Rutgers University, and then a few years later, I got a position at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and I’ve been there for more than 20 years. I’m really interested in how our minds develop. I identify myself as a cognitive psychologist who’s interested in the emergence of cognitive mechanisms in young children. 

[00:01:46.390] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, great. These are the topics that I am personally interested in, too. What initially got you interested in studying memory in children? 

[00:01:58.140] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

At the very beginning, I was really interested in how object representations emerge in young children’s minds. I was specifically focusing on infants. I did a lot of work early on on infants. How can they understand the world around them, the here and now that they’re in, and what they can remember about those over brief periods of time, and how can they figure out what’s happening around them? How does that understanding that we have about our physical world around them emerges very early on. That took me in the direction of studying working memory because these representations, the way we form meaning are living in a space, this mentor workspace that we call working memory. I also, a very important inspiration or source of ideas for my work was watching my own children learn about the world. Many other developmental psychologists in the past have done the same. I learned a lot from them. My children were doing lots of really interesting things that I didn’t read about in the research literature that I was working on. For example, one of my daughters was about two, two and a half years old. She had developed this really fascinating game where she had little plastic animals that she loved very much, dolphin, cat, and the camel. 

[00:03:25.800] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Then she put all her shoes in a row let’s say, six shoes, and she hid these little animals in the shoes. When we asked her, Do you know where the dolphin is? She would be able to show it to us. I was fascinated by that because most of our results or most of the science of working memory development focuses on how kids at various ages can’t remember as much as adults. We know this to be true in various contexts, but here There she was essentially demonstrating something that really went against the green. I’ve always been fascinated by trying to find results where kids seem to be doing better than what we expect of them. This was one of our inspirations for work that we conducted later on. 

[00:04:20.390] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I think we are on the same boat by that. Before my role in APS, I was a developmental cognitive scientist. Yeah, the same story for me, too. Theory and practice can be definitely different. I have a 10-year-old now. Every year, there is something new that I discover about human mind through her eyes, through her thinking Everything, basically. 

[00:04:45.980] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Yeah. 

[00:04:46.580] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

So your research question is also applicable to everyone, right? It is not only children. It explores how children balance internal memory with external resources. This particular study. Can you explain the concept of the extended mind and how it applies to children’s learning and how it applies to us, to adults? 

[00:05:12.470] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

This also started with an interesting observation that we made as parents. We had a four-year-old, my collaborator and I, who was also my husband. We were fascinated by this experience, which many parents share that if you read a bedtime story to your child who can’t read yet. They’re three, four years old, and you’re getting tired and you’re trying to, let’s say, skip a page, your child will remind you, No, no, no. There was something worse there. You can’t trick them. Once we realized this, and also just asked her, Do you know the story? Can you tell the story? She could recite, maybe not the entire poem, but huge parts of the poem without us ever trying to teach her. That fascinated us because, again, this is an evidence for memory that’s surprisingly great. We couldn’t recite the text ourselves, but she could. We designed a study around it. This was now several years ago, but this was our first the Exploration of the Extended Mind. We found that four-year-olds, if you try to do the same thing with a new story over 10 days, the parents could not recite the story, but the kids were extremely good. 

[00:06:29.110] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

They got more than twice as many words correct from the stories afterwards without knowing that they had to memorize anything. This was our first foray into studying the extended mind, which is really fascinating. The term itself came from two philosophers about a little more than 25 years ago, Andy Clarke and Dave Chalmers. What they meant by the extended mind is something very simple. It’s something that we do all the time as adults. If you’re trying to remember something, you jot it down on a piece of paper or put it on a sticky note and never think about it, that what you’re actually doing is alleviating your memory load by offloading some information into an external resource. And what Clarke and Chalmers said, essentially, were very provocative ideas that you can literally see that notebook as an extension of your own mind. And really, this is one of the main reasons why writing was invented so that we don’t have to keep things in our memory because we know that our memory is fragile. It’s hard to memorize things. This way we could keep track of things without doing all that. The first written records were actually accounting ledgers. 

[00:07:47.730] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

The Egyptians wrote down how many sheep and cows one had and how much it cost. These were basically things so you didn’t have to remember them. What’s also What’s also really interesting is that ever since people invented writing, we’ve been worrying about what that does to our memory skills. If you go back to Socrates, Socrates said that the discovery of writing will essentially create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, which I always thought it was a really nice way to put it because they don’t have to use their memory. As far back as 3,000 years ago, people were worrying about this. These were the ideas that got us started and inspired us to study the extended mind. 

[00:08:38.760] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, this is fascinating. Going back to that reading experience, which I also did with my daughter, it is almost like they don’t know the trick yet. They don’t know that they can use these external tools, but we do. 

[00:08:53.380] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

That’s exactly how we interpreted those results, too, that the kids, they like the stories. They want to hold on the stories, but the only way you can do that is by memorizing them. That skill of memorizing is something that some adults maintain, but most adults don’t. If you’re an actor, a professional actor, an opera singer, you have to use that skill and exercise that skill. But as a four-year-old, you need that so that you can remember fun stories. We just don’t have that skill exercise as much, most people. 

[00:09:29.350] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. Your study is brilliant. You designed a virtual shopping game for kids. How does this game simulate real-world memory use and what were some key findings? 

[00:09:43.130] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Again, we were really thinking hard about this Clark and Chalmer’s idea, and we thought, what’s the naturalistic context where we write notes to ourselves? The first thing that came up to our mind is shopping lists. We all write shopping lists. Sometimes we do it on our phones, sometimes on pieces of paper. Shopping is an activity that kids often participate in, and they’re familiar with. Even though they don’t write the shopping list themselves, they can see their parents maybe using their phones nowadays to keep track of what they need to get. We started thinking about shopping as a context for all this. We did some looking into the history of these ideas and found a fascinating work from the 1950s by a Soviet psychologist. His last name is Istomina, who published the first of these as a child psychologist looking at how does memory work in a shopping context versus a laboratory context. Once I saw this link, I found that really fascinating, that this idea that to build on kids’ strengths, existing strengths, things that they know already, I think is very important for all developmental psychologists. In our task, what they do is we have a shopping list and a store. 

[00:11:02.490] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

This is a tablet-based game. Each of these are on the left and right side of a tablet, and you can’t see both at the same time. You either see the list or you see the store, but you can toggle between them. That’s the game. The instructions are very simple. You look at the list. Of course, kids can’t read yet, the kids that we were testing. So we used pictures, little icons instead of words. The The task is very simple. You just have to find those items on your shopping list in the store, but you have to remember them as you go back and forth. The question that we looked at, specifically, is that what if you were told that you can go back and forth as many times as you want. Your list is long. We had 10 items on that list. You can’t memorize them all. How many are you going to memorize? Are you going to memorize one at a time? And then go back and forth and just, Hey, I picked Okay, I’m going to go find banana. Now, I picked a pretzel. I’m going to go and find pretzel. Or you’re going to try to remember a few items each time, go to the store, and then maybe risk making some mistakes given that you’re trying to tax your memory a bit more. 

[00:12:18.590] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

This flexible use of your memory resources was really what we were really interested in, and whether kids at an early age can adjust their strategy strategies depending on how hard is it to go back and forth. We did one manipulation where we added a little annoying lag time. When you press the button to go back to the list, you couldn’t see the list immediately. You had to wait four seconds, which is in the context of a game, it’s a little annoying. We were curious if kids at this early age will decide then to, Okay, maybe I I should memorize a few more items because I don’t want to go back. I don’t like the lag time or the lagginess of this game. I’m going to memorize more, I’m going to study it more and memorize more and take more in each trip. That’s That’s really what we found. 

[00:13:16.500] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, so that is genius, really, because one thing children don’t like is waiting. Once you introduce it, they started using their memory more. It’s a trade-off, like you said. Let’s talk about it a little more in terms of what it means for us. Why is this trade-off important and what does it tell us about cognitive development? 

[00:13:46.630] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

First of all, no one has really studied this phenomenon in children. There have been some studies in adults, but when we started this work, there was only one other team that was looking at something similar, Dr. Melissa Kibi at Boston University, and they published a paper where they looked at something similar with slightly older kids in a task that was a little more complicated and could not be adapted for younger kids. We started with a different context, with different rules, a simplified, more streamlined paradigm, and just wanted to see whether kids at this age are recognizing what’s going on when you’re imposing, essentially, a cost to this trade-off. The reason why this is important is because a lot of work on memory development, especially in working memory development, is focusing on capacity, the question of capacity. How much can we remember? Do kids remember less, more? How does that trajectory look like over development, which is very important. Our own team has contributed to that literature, but it doesn’t really tell you about the use of those resources. In a naturalistic setting, do use all of your capacity or half of your capacity or the minimum that you can get away with, essentially. 

[00:15:07.380] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

There are individual differences, for example, in how much you’re willing to stress or force your cognitive resources. These are all questions that we are now able to look at now that we have this, essentially, this demonstration that very young kids, they’re sensitive to the constraints in this trade-off. 

[00:15:28.060] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. Because I’m a mom as well, I can see it. The thing you are saying is maybe there are resources available to them, but maybe they are not using them. It might be more fun when there are no barriers to go back and forth It’s good. Just play. It is fun. But the moment you introduce waiting for them, they start using their memory. That is really interesting. I know that in your study, you tested children in both the US and China. Did you observe any notable differences in how kids from these two cultures approach the task? 

[00:16:09.170] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Because we were moving into a new territory, essentially, there hasn’t been earlier research looking at this. We didn’t know how robust this phenomenon across cultures, and we were really interested in that aspect. Our graduate student, Ebi Aulian, who is the first author in this paper, is from China, and he had the opportunity to work with colleagues at Hangzhou University in China to essentially replicate our experiment there. We were really curious, are we going to see any differences Because we know in our field, there are lots of results that seem to be results that are culturally universal. Then there are results, for example, visual illusions is a very good example where culture is incredibly important. We weren’t sure where our task is on this continuum. What we found was really fascinating. Essentially, there were very, very minor, basically negligible differences between these groups of kids. We tested kids in the Northeastern US in children’s museums. Parents who were interested in participating in our studies could walk by, and we had a nice a quiet space where we could have kids play this game. In China, they were in a kindergarten classroom, and their teachers walked them to a testing room where the study was conducted. 

[00:17:41.400] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

The context was very different. The ages of the kids were the same. Overall, what we found was that the trade-off, how they modified their behavior, their looking back and forth was exactly the same, which was really fascinating for us. This is just the very first step into studying the generative of this phenomenon. What really could answer this question would be a large course cultural study involving lots of different kids around the world. I’m hoping to do something like that a future online study. 

[00:18:17.710] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. This is the first step, hinting that this might be a universal phenomenon. I definitely understand your motivation to test children from other cultures. This is a great conversation. I have a couple of questions left. One, I just wanted to ask you this thing that we parents talk about among each other. In an age where information is always at our fingertips, do you think children today rely more on external memory than previous generations? Should we worry about that? I really like that you mentioned all older generations are either worried about the younger generations not doing enough work or whatever that is. What are your thoughts about this? 

[00:19:11.370] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

Yeah, that’s why I love that quote because Nowadays, nobody worries about kids, or most people don’t worry about what books kids get their hands on. We’re happy when our kids are reading books and we encourage them to read books, but we worry about their phones news. We currently don’t have a really good handle on what advice we can give to parents yet because things are happening so fast. We have a sense that there’s something very different about reading a book and scrolling on your phone, and we don’t want our kids to become shallow or distracted. I think that the cognitive psychology here has a tremendous task ahead of us and something that we need to focus focus a lot of our energies on. Understanding is what is it about our new technologies that’s not like books? What is it about misinformation or false information that we worry about? What is it about the rapid flow of information that can be worrying, especially when it comes to kids use of technology. I think a lot of our colleagues are already working on this, but I think that this should be a really important goal for our next 10, 20 years of research to find out what’s bad and what’s good about technology use as well. 

[00:20:37.860] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

We all know that we love to be able to find things at our fingertips. We don’t have to remember a lot of things because we can just look it up. But for kids, they also have to understand and teachers have to figure out ways to demonstrate to kids that it’s still really important to know things. It’s just because you can look it up, it doesn’t mean that it’s not important to actually learn and know certain things about the world because critical thinking cannot develop and cannot flourish without facts. You need to start with evidence, with things that are true so that you can think about causality, how things work, why they work the way they work. You cannot do that in a vacuum. That’s a huge challenge for all of us who care about kids’ cognitive development. 

[00:21:34.840] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I think there needs to be a lot of testing. There needs to be future studies. It was writing centuries ago. Now, It is the tablets and ChatGPT that we are worried about. I think it will never end. Well, Zsuzsa, thank you so much for this conversation. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners? 

[00:22:05.250] – Zsuzsa Kaldy 

I wanted to thank this opportunity to be able to talk about our team’s research. I’m really passionate about talking about cognitive development in a larger context, especially at a time when the general public often doesn’t know about the benefits of science and the work that we do. I’d like to thank you for this opportunity. Yeah, it was our pleasure. 

[00:22:30.470] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with APS, and I have been speaking to Zsuzsa Kaldy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. Would you like to reach us? Send us your thoughts and questions at underthecortex@psychologicalscience.org.