(ORDO NEWS) — It is much more difficult for children to concentrate on one thing, and this is normal. But it turned out that in order to cope with such tasks, children find hidden “tricks”.
It is difficult for children to sit still and concentrate. But they easily find “workarounds”
Compared to adults, children are not yet able to concentrate as well, remember less and their concentration of attention is relatively small.
This is related to the stage of cognitive development. As a result, the solution of certain tasks that require concentration is given to them with difficulty.
Baby tricks
The work of a research group of scientists from the Max Planck Institute has shown that a wider focus of attention can be an advantage for children: due to this, they are good at processing less significant information and using it to find new, more creative problem-solving strategies.
In adults, scientists have also observed spontaneous changes in problem solving strategy, similar to the so-called “aha moments” that make solving easier.
Children are significantly worse at solving problems using traditional strategies that require concentration and attention, they are just as likely as adults to cope with tasks using various tricks.
The study, which has been ongoing since 2013, used the following method for the tests: 47 children aged 8 to 10 and 39 young adults aged 20 to 35 were asked to complete the same task.
In this task, they were asked to determine the position of a drawing using two possible answers. The color of the picture was initially unrelated to the correct answer, but as the task progressed, it became associated with the correct answer.
When the participants noticed this, they were able to solve the problem much more efficiently and easily.
Participants were not informed that there would be other factors influencing possible solution strategies and could only determine them themselves.
It turned out that while the children used only the initially introduced rules, they coped with the task worse than when they discovered a trick that facilitates the solution. The same was observed in the case of adults.
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