we were having a dinner party one day, and my elder daughter, who was about four at the time, five, was bored to tears, and she was playing with, you know, those little things you put your knife and fork on when you’re not using them? [12:54] And she was trying to balance her knife on it, and the knife, of course, is unevenly weighted. But she kept putting it in the middle, and it would fall down as she put it back in the middle. Seesaw. Yes. And I thought, why isn’t she reading the information that this is falling and she should move it? [13:09] And she didn’t. So I developed a whole set of experiments to try and understand why children impose their own theories on the world when counterexamples are glaring back at them. (View Highlight)
So when I looked in the experiments, four- to five-year-olds could balance all of the blocks. They simply read back the feedback they were getting in their hands, the proprioceptive feedback. But around seven, children started to really impose this idea that everything balances in its geometric center, and they would just ignore counterexamples. Later, they took those counterexamples into account in a much more theoretical way, if you like. But I think this notion that you first succeed in the world, then humans want to understand how that success took place and unpack it, and will often then get worse before they get better again. [14:24] So the older child is getting a little theory about the world, and that makes their behaviour worse, but they’re actually developing something richer. But the theory itself is incomplete? It’s incomplete, and it will become complete over time with new examples and new ideas that are coming from different domains as they grow, as they learn. (View Highlight)
So it’s particularly in my field of developmental disorders. So a lot of the work on developmental disorders has used adult neuropsychology to make their claim. So in adult neuropsychology, for instance, you get a person who’s had a stroke and has grammar that’s not working properly but the rest of the system seems to work well, or they can’t recognize faces but their language is fine. [15:19] And that kind of model of isolated parts of the brain that independently function has been used to understand children. And my argument is that even though adults may have those independently functioning parts, in the child brain that happens gradually over time and that initially there’s a lot of interaction across domains and those gradually specialise as a function of development. (View Highlight)