Preschoolers can outsmart grown-ups at figuring out gadgets

A new study suggests that preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they're more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect.

The new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh, shows that children can sometimes outsmart grownups when it comes to figuring out how gadgets work because they're less biased in their ideas about cause and effect.

The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces.

The findings also build upon the researchers' efforts to use children's cognitive smarts to teach machines to learn in more human ways.

"As far as we know, this is the first study examining whether children can learn abstract cause and effect relationships, and comparing them to adults," UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, senior author of the paper, said.

The study is published online in the journal, Cognition.