Kids as young as 4 innately use sorting algorithms to solve problems

Children as young as 4 years are able to find effective solutions to complex problems, such as the independent invent of sorting algorithms developed by IT. Scientists behind the discovery say that these skills emerge much earlier than we thought before, and should force a rethink of development psychology.

The experiences carried out by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and widely popularized in the 1960s asked children to physically sort a collection of sticks in length, a Piaget task called series. His tests revealed until the age of 7, children did not apply any structured strategy; They addressed the problem disorderly by tests and errors.

But new research by Huiwen Alex Yang and his colleagues from the University of California in Berkeley show that a minority of children even 4 years old can develop algorithmic solutions at the same task and over 5 years more than a quarter is capable of the same thing.

“Perhaps we don’t give children to children,” said Yang. “We have to dig a little more about what children really do, their reasoning capacity.”

In the experience, the team asked 123 children aged 4 to 9 to sort a series of digital rabbits images in the height order. Initially, they were able to see the rabbits in a group and directly compare their heights, and all the children were able to order them correctly with relative ease.

But later, the heights of all rabbits were obscured and the only way to compare them was to select two at a time. When selected, the children were informed if the rabbits were already in the right order or if they were in the wrong order, in which the rabbits were switched automatically after being visualized. This forced children to offer a new strategy to order them without being able to see the whole group at the same time.

The researchers have looked for evidence of children applying known solutions, traveling their sequence of comparisons for the proof of the use of existing algorithms. The team found that overall, the children still went well above chance – in fact, they discovered independently at least two effective algorithmic solutions to the problem of sorting developed by the field of computer science: the sorting of selection and the sorting of shaker.

In 34% of the tests, the children used a sequence of comparisons suggesting that they used – at least for a while – a known sorting algorithm. In 110 tests out of the total 667 carried out, The children used the selection sorting and in 141 tests, they used the sorting of shaker. In 21 other tests, they used a combination of the two algorithms. In total, 67 of the 123 children used at least one identifiable algorithm, and 30 of children used the two strategies at different times of the experience.

But the number of children using an algorithm to resolve the tasks was certainly linked to age. Only 2.9% of 4 -year -old children used an identifiable algorithm, while this went to 25.5% for children 5 years and 30.7 for 6 -year -old children. At 9 years old, more than 54% of children used an identifiable algorithm.

“There is a long history of reversal of Piaget,” explains Andrew Bremner at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Bremner says that he considers Piaget as a genius that revolutionized development psychology and staged the stages that children are going through during learning the world, but admits that he “was not a fantastic experimentalist” and he often designed bad tests without appropriate controls. “People began to emphasize that children could do things he said they couldn’t do, much younger.”

Essentially, in recent decades, it has been gradually shown that Piaget had the good idea for the development of childhood, but was slightly pessimistic about the ages to which children crossed the process. And this new research adds to this weight of evidence. But interesting, he focuses on the series, which, according to Bremner, was one of the last Piaget experiences and the most obstinate of Piaget apply to younger children than we thought before.

“Children can demonstrate success to this task in this particular context much earlier than we predict it,” explains Bremner. “So they are not content to approach the world as a kind of virgin slate, but they apply strategic approaches to the ways they are trying to solve problems.”

Sam Wass at the University of East London, in the United Kingdom, said that Piaget thought that children had to build an in-depth understanding of complex systems before they could develop strategies to work with them, but that this is increasingly considered useless.

“This research is part of a great wave of psychology that questions the idea that, in order to generate behaviors that seem complex, you must have complex thoughts and an understanding of underlie them,” explains Wass. “”In fact, as this study shows, you can produce behaviors that seem complex depending on a set of much more parsimonious rules. »»