Young children learn an enormous amount through imitation. They learn to speak, use cutlery (although some seem to unlearn that skill as teenagers 😉), kick a ball, or tie their shoelaces by watching others and then trying it themselves. Watching and practising is a remarkably powerful way to learn. We also know that young children are highly sensitive to statistical patterns. When certain sounds or events repeatedly occur together, they quickly pick up on those regularities.
But is that the whole story?
A new study published in Nature Communications suggests it is not. According to Benjamin Pitt and colleagues, children appear to do something more. They also try to discover the underlying rule behind a pattern. In other words, they are not only learning what happens, but also trying to understand why the pattern is organised the way it is.
A difficult question to study
That sounds straightforward in theory, but it is surprisingly difficult to investigate properly. If you present children with familiar patterns, they can rely on previous experience. To avoid this, the researchers designed entirely novel tasks.
A total of 141 children between the ages of three and thirteen from two very different cultural backgrounds took part: children from the United States and Tsimane’ children from the Bolivian Amazon, some of whom had received little or no formal schooling. They were shown short sequences of coloured balls or geometric shapes and were then asked either to predict how the pattern should continue or to recreate the same pattern using different colours, different shapes, or longer sequences. Importantly, the children received no explanations and no feedback about whether their answers were correct.
By testing children from such different backgrounds, the researchers could examine whether the findings depended largely on schooling or instead reflected a more general feature of human cognition.
More than copying
What did they find? Both the American and the Tsimane’ children were surprisingly good at identifying the underlying structure of the patterns. The most interesting results came from the most demanding tasks. Children did not simply have to copy a pattern; they had to translate it into different symbols or extend it into longer sequences. That seems difficult to explain by merely remembering the last few elements or simply copying what they had seen. The children needed some understanding of the rule behind the pattern.
But how were they doing this?
To address that question, the researchers compared several computational models. Models based solely on simple associations between neighbouring elements explained the children’s responses less well than a model assuming that children infer an underlying rule or algorithm governing the pattern.
An interesting hypothesis
This is where an important nuance comes in. The study provides convincing evidence that children do more than simply imitate or learn basic associations. However, that does not automatically mean that the human brain literally works in the same way as the proposed computational model. That remains an interesting hypothesis rather than an established fact.
The researchers refer to this process as program induction: the idea that children attempt to reconstruct the “program” that generated the examples they observe. The fact that this computational model fits the data better than simpler alternatives does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes how the brain actually works. The authors themselves explicitly acknowledge this limitation.
What does this mean for education?
One reason I wanted to write about this study is that it would be easy to draw the wrong educational conclusions.
The findings do not imply that discovery learning has suddenly become superior to explicit instruction.
What the study does suggest is that even very young children actively search for structure. They try to infer rules from a limited number of examples, much as adults do. That ability is probably an important part of how humans acquire new knowledge and skills and fits well with Piaget’s classic view of the child as an active constructor of knowledge.
However, this tells us what children are capable of doing, not how they learn most effectively in the classroom.
For teachers, then, this study changes little about the existing evidence on effective instruction. What it does offer is a fascinating glimpse into a fundamental aspect of human cognition: children are not merely skilled imitators. They also seem to be constantly searching for the logic behind what they observe.
Perhaps that helps explain why humans, across cultures and environments, can acquire such an astonishing range of skills in such a remarkably short time.