(Referenced study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027721003632 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...) I wonde

(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.