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In ‘learning trap’ experiment, adults leap to conclusions while children explore
- oneofthefirst 5y agoVery interesting! This reminds me of a Veritasium video I watched years ago, called “The most common cognitive bias” [1]. People don’t explore solution spaces as effectively as they think they do. [1] https://youtu.be/vKA4w2O61Xo https://youtu.be/vKA4w2O61Xo
- tims33 5y agoComplex proof of Zen Buddhism's Beginners Mind concept.
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoThis game is so dumb, and there is no reward in exploring. Basically they said that the maximum reward you could get is a star. And now adult founds that there is a way to get those. The optimal way now is to repeat the same step because it is guaranteed that exploring can't be better. The better thing could be the maximum number of stars aren't revealed and then it could be explore vs exploit scenario.
- thewakalix 5y agoI don't think you get to choose which block you use -- from the article, it seems that you're given a sequence of blocks, and you have a binary choice of use/don't use for each block in the sequence.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.md/53mxS https://archive.md/53mxS
- syberiyxx 5y agoAdults have established hierarchies in their lives. Children are looking for them and looking for cracks.
- pleb_nz 5y agoI could see the benefit from both approaches. My guess is jumping to conclusions has probably saved many a human ( and animal) energy and lives throughout history. I also remember reading a research group managed to train adults to learn like kids again. Can't seem to find it now, but maybe it's not set in stone and we could benefit from both approaches where needed in life.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago"If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion." - DNA
- kubanczyk 5y ago> DNA Noel - what a sweet sweet handle. TIL
- underwater 5y agoNot sure why you'd write the the author like that? Douglas Adams, for the curious.
- ransom1538 5y ago"My guess is jumping to conclusions has probably saved many a human ( and animal) energy and lives throughout history." Exactly. EG: In 10,000BC you hear a cat hissing in a cave. You figure you shouldn't go into the cave. You wouldn't try to second guess yourself and "explore".
- falcor84 5y ago>Children gathered much more evidence than the adults and were much better at learning. Most of the children did figure out the right rule. However, they earned fewer stars than the grown-ups. For me, this sentence at the end breaks the whole argument down - so the adult strategy was indeed more effective at the the thing being optimized for! The question then is - could they set this up such that kids actually perform better than adults?
- bsder 5y agoYeah, it kind of undermines the whole thing. The adults learned a "good enough" rule that works until someone gives them a provably better one.
- Jensson 5y agoRepeat it 1000 times and the better learning should start to kick in. That kinda mimics life, you learn as a kid and the execute as an adult.
- wisty 5y agoIIRC if you repeat it 1000 times the adults can start to figure out the rules. Kids are quicker at solving totally novel problems where pre-existing knowledge actually makes it harder, but adults are usually capable of figuring out their priors are bad if they have enough time. The exception is when they don't have good feedback, and are satisficing (their mistake isn't so bad that they realise they need to keep working on the solution).
- notahacker 5y agoBecause the "trap" was a local optimum for solving the problem adults would probably only figure out they were applying the wrong rule if you told them their score was low. But they'd figure it out pretty quickly if you did... Skimming the study, it seems like the kids' ability to learn the correct rule by "exploring" was cancelled out in some of their tests by their ability to completely forget it when new [irrelevant] information was introduced in the form making the objects a different colour Also kids aren't guaranteed to catch up adult scores if they're more likely to lose motivation. We're talking about a study that noted it excluded a participant who "refused to continue after seeing the sad face" :D
- mattdeboard 5y agoI think of it in terms of the brain's pattern-recognition capacity: As we experience more of the world over time, the model of the world we build internally gets more and more elaborate. Eventually, we experience enough we can start noticing metapatterns. Something like, "if something is bad, it usually doesn't get better" is an example of a metapattern which seems like it could be in play in this study. Of course, we lose out on some experiences, because that heuristic is quite prone to false negatives. I think that's basically what the experiment in the article illustrates, this "lossy filter" in our brain's future-planner. (I am making no claims about the physical structure of the brain.)
- ilaksh 5y agoMakes sense but I suspect (not an expert) that there are sort of fundamental/physical ways that children's brains differ. Somehow different chemistry or structures involved.
- playpause 5y agoThese ideas aren’t exclusive, in fact they may require each other to be true.
- mattdeboard 5y agoYes, in fact this is true.[1] “Indeed, [due to an immature prefrontal cortex] adolescents are risk-taking and novelty-seeking individuals and they are more likely to weigh positive experiences more heavily and negative experiences less so than adults. This behavioral bias can lead to engagement in risky activities like reckless driving, unprotected sex, and drug abuse.” There is a great deal of research on this. Its implications for society are profound. Robert Sapolsky is a prominent public face of the latest science on the development of the human brain and the implications for society. He can be found all over YouTube, and I can personally attest his latest book, “Behave,” is illuminating. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/
- hyperpallium2 5y ago"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
- jhncls 5y agoThis reminds of Steve Jobs' speech, "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." "... following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on." https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/ https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- platz 5y ago> more than 70% of the adults never did figure out the right rule. Wish they said how many children figured out the rule.
- the__alchemist 5y agoThe puzzle mechanism and trap reminds me of how puzzles are laid out in parts of The Witness. The rules are sometimes subtle, and solving puzzles is a matter of learning what they are, and questioning your assumptions. The treehouse area is an especially good example.
- ghotli 5y agoIf only there were more games just like it
- zetazzed 5y agoAlison Gopnik is a huge name in the psychology of child development. If you find this area interesting, I recommend her interview with Ezra Klein: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-alison-gopnik-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
- wirthjason 5y agoWhile people can learn to program at any age I wonder what kind of psychological experiments could tell us about old programmers vs young/kid programmers and how a developer’s mind changes over time.
- divbzero 5y agoDoes this natural tendency to “explore” explain why children will try doing again the thing you just asked them not to do? And then follow that up with different variations of said thing to see how you react?
- giantrobot 5y agoSome kids are just assholes.
- tux3 5y agoIt's not medically impossible that some kids are just, in fact, hardwired to be assholes. But it's pretty unhelpful to the children if you give up on understanding their problems like that and just label them bad. What are they going to better after you call them an asshole.
- giantrobot 5y agoYou don't have to tell a kid to their face they're an asshole. Do you not have a filter at all? Kids in general can't be expected to act like adults because their brains are still developing. They also lack experience to inform their actions. Some seem like assholes because of these factors. It's just important however to realize that some kids are assholes. No matter how you humor them or mollify them, they'll still be assholes. After trying to humor them and understand them if they turn out to be assholes you can just deal with them (or don't) like you would any other adult asshole.
- presentation 5y agoI’m not a parent nor have I thought about this at all, but this comment in another thread on this post has an interesting take on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29214843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29214843
- saeranv 5y agoSomeone needs to explain to these children that they'll never ship if they don't put limits on their exploration.
- kurikuri 5y ago(Referenced study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027721003632 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...) I wonder if changing the overt objective to ‘learn the rule’ would result in the adults outperforming the children? If you’re told to maximize the number of points, then learning the point value distribution of the blocks is a secondary objective, and we could also wave the conclusion of this experiment as “children don’t follow arbitrarily-valued objectives as well as adults.” Or we can understand this result as an expression of an adult’s developed executive function suppressing the desire to learn for the sake of reaching an objective. I’m reading the researchers’ interpretation of this experiment as “children have a higher desire to learn” when executive function could explain that while also not diminishing the desire of adults to learn.
- hammock 5y agoYou may be onto something. Nevertheless the finding still has real world application. I am reminded of a/b testing in websites or emails, for example. If the goal is to maximize clicks, you may never "learn the rule," as it were, and instead lean on familiar and previously-tested concepts, getting stuck in a local maximum. On the other hand, if in an explicit mind shift you say "let's try everything to see what happens," you may "lose" far more often, but gain a comprehensive map of the landscape in return, which can help you in future efforts to break into new heights of engagement.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoIn nature, it's advantageous for children and adults to have distinct capabilities in this regard, since children don't normally compete with adults - rather, the two work together to gather as many high quality stars as possible, to share with the whole family. Adults usually having more and varied responsibilities makes it better for them to jump to conclusions, thereby leaving time and energy for the other stuff. Children have less responsibility, so they can afford the curiosity that may find them stars the adults missed. Indeed, one major adult responsibility is keeping children safe, which often means curtailing their excessive curiosity.
- vmception 5y agoAlso in nature, children die and this is motivated by probability by having many offspring Still true in alot of the world
- vmception 5y ago*mitigated not motivated
- Qem 5y agoI also think this. Children surely were like small probes for their communities, specially in the past. Just think the amazing variety of foodstuff traditional cultures were able to tell apart from the poisonous stuff. How did they learn that? My guess is, countless children puting unknown things in their mouths, and either surviving while discovering a new delicacy, or dying, but teaching their elders about a new poison in the process.
- kqr 5y agoYou can trigger this difference in groups of adults too, by adjusting the external incentives involved. Adults trained with external reinforcements (performance bonuses such as monetary rewards, gold stars, grades, rankings, etc.) will perform better during training compared to ones that receive no performance bonuses. However, after the training is finished, the ones that received no bonuses will generally be more skilled than the ones that did, because without the allure of the bonus they went for internal motivation instead, and challenged themselves with tough cases which allowed them to get better. So the next time you're in an environment with a performance bonus component, ask yourself whether you really want to optimise for the short term over the longer term. If you prefer long term learning, maybe change your environment.
- rendall 5y agoThe conundrum is introduced by this: "The point of the game is to figure out which blocks make the machine light up and earn as many stars as you can." Figuring out "which blocks make the machine light up" is not the same as "earning as many stars as you can", apparently. If the original research introduced this ambiguity, then I don't think the conclusions of a "learning trap" are supported. Compare adults' and children's performances given a single goal, either "figure out the rule" or "earn more stars", but not both. The children are likely to have misunderstood the directive to mean that the way to earn the most stars is by figuring out the rule, while adults properly understood the tradeoffs to earn the most stars
- jaza 5y agoKids don't need their stars to pay the bills and make it to the next paycheck. (Replace stars with dollars and cents) grown-ups do!
- plank 5y agoSeems the grown-ups strategy is consistent with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion So why is this an article?
- derbOac 5y agoI think it's worth demonstrating this in this kind of context to characterize how children adults might be different. There's a lot of interest in aging and what that means, broadly speaking. However, I agree this involves some fairly broad principles. I think you could even say this is kinda how Bayesian inference works too. If you use a [strongly informative] prior, on average you get a better estimate, but you're taking the gamble that your prior applies.