Читать книгу The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides - Mariano Sigman - Страница 19

Children, from a very young age, have a sophisticated mechanism for seeking out and building knowledge. We were all scientists in our childhood,^fn10 and not only out of a desire to explore, to break things apart to see how they work – or used to work – or to pester adults with an infinite number of questions beginning ‘Why?’ We were also little scientists because of the method we employed to discover the universe.

Science has the virtue of being able to construct theories based on scant, ambiguous data. From the paltry remnants of light from some dead stars, cosmologists were able to build an effective theory on the origin of the universe. Scientific procedure is especially effective when we know the precise experiment to discriminate between different theories. And kids are naturally gifted at this job.

A game with buttons (push buttons, keys or switches) and functions (lights, noise, movement) is like a small universe. As they play, children make interventions that allow them to reveal mysteries and discover the causal rules of that universe. Playing is discovering. In fact, the intensity of a child’s game depends on how much uncertainty the child has with regard to the rules that govern it. And when children don’t know how a simple machine works, they usually spontaneously play in the way that is most effective to discover its functioning mechanism. This is very similar to a precise aspect of the scientific method: investigation and methodical exploration in order to discover and clarify causal relationships in the universe.

But children’s natural exploration of science goes even further: they construct theories and models according to the most plausible explanation for the data they observe.

There are many examples of this, but the most elegant begins in 1988 with an experiment by Andrew Meltzoff – again – which produced the following scene. An actor enters a room and sits in front of a box with a large plastic button, pushes the button with their head and, as if the box were a slot machine paying out, there is a fanfare with colourful lights and sounds. Afterwards, a one-year-old baby who has been observing the scene is seated, on their mother’s lap, in front of the same machine. And then, spontaneously, the young child leans forward and presses the button with their head.

Did they simply imitate the actor or had the one-year-old discovered a causal relationship between the button and the lights? Deciding between these two possibilities would require a new experiment like the one proposed by the Hungarian psychologist György Gergely, fourteen years later. Meltzoff thought that the babies were imitating the actor when they pressed the button with their head. Gergely had another, much bolder and more interesting idea. The babies understand that the adult is intelligent and, because of that, if they didn’t push the button with their hand, which would be more natural, it was because pushing it with their head was strictly necessary.

This bold theory suggests that the reasoning of babies turns out to be much more sophisticated, and includes a theory of how things and people work. But how can one detect such reasoning in a child that doesn’t yet talk? Gergely solved it in a simple, elegant way. Imagine an analogous situation in everyday life. A person is walking with many bags and opens a door handle with an elbow. We all understand that door handles are not meant to be opened with your elbow and the person did that because there was no other option. What would happen if we replicated this idea in Meltzoff’s experiment? The same actor arrives, loaded down with bags, and pushes the button with their head. If the babies are simply imitating the actor, they would do the same. But if, on the other hand, they are capable of thinking logically, they will understand that the actor pushed it with their head because their hands were full and, therefore, all the babies needed to do to get the colourful lights and sounds was to push the button, with any part of their body.

They carried out the experiment. The baby observed the actor, laden with shopping bags, pushing the button with their head. Then the child sits on their mother’s lap and pushes the button with their hands. It is the same baby that, upon seeing the actor do the same thing but with their hands free, had pushed the button with their head.

One-year-olds construct theories on how things work based on what they observe. And among those observations is that of perceiving other people’s perspectives, working out how much they know, what they can and cannot do. In other words, exploring science.