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I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drink

I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drinking alcohol!

sethammons 2y ago
If you take this picture and ask adults and kids which way the bus is traveling, kids get it right more often than adults https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adults-fail-kids-pass-simple-bailey-mlod https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adult... Spoilers: adults prune information for more efficient processing and in doing so lose information
- mopierotti 2y ago
  I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors. Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack of knowledge. (Of levels of abstraction in representation and of vehicle design.) That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the underlying point being made.
  - janniehater 2y ago
    [dead]
  - soared 2y ago
    Or because kids are very familiar with busses and adults are not.
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      Interestingly I got it instantly but I’ve used busses far more in my adult life than as a child
    - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
      Why would kids be more familiar with busses than adults?
      - xattt 2y ago
        > Why are [large vehicles] so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/megafauna-mecha-fauna-machines-nature/ https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
        dkdbejwi383 2y ago
        I don’t see the correlation, sorry! I’d expect an adult to be more familiar with a bus by virtue of having taken the bus more often than a child. Whether or not that’s exciting or just a mundane commute shouldn’t affect familiarity.
      - I_am_uncreative 2y ago
        School buses are a staple of childhood, at least in the US.
  - cnasc 2y ago
    Yeah, this bus is clearly intended to be a school bus but it’s missing too much detail. If the absence of the door is a valid clue, then so is the absence of the big red stop sign that is on the non-door-side.
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      Lay off the copium - busses don’t have red stop signs everywhere (for example they don’t have them here) But they always have doors…
      - defrost 2y ago
        The other day someone pointed at the open platform of RM1353 and asked me: did you take the doors off this bus? “No, it was built that way.” She looked amazed, and pleased. https://www.theredbus.co.uk/blog/platform-sharing https://www.theredbus.co.uk/blog/platform-sharing
      - asddubs 2y ago
        they also always have mirrors, which is the first thing an adult would probably look for (since it applies more universally to vehicles)
    - phist_mcgee 2y ago
      Big red stop sign? Like on the bus?
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    Isn't this exactly the point? You look at this the analytical way, decide the bus doesn't have enough detail to be a realistic representation and stop there, maybe looking around for other clues. A very good example imo. Sure, the bus could be in reverse, but it could also be a British bus driving in the US. Or we could be looking at a reflection of the bus. Or we could be looking at the reflection of a British bus going in reverse. This is not about determining the direction with 100% certainty. This is about having a clue at all which you can justify, which adults mostly don't.
  - anonymous_sorry 2y ago
    I don't think the point is to nitpick how realistic the representation is or how fair the question is. The point is children react to the question differently from the way adults do. And that's true despite (or perhaps because of) what an adult thinks of the question.
    - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
      But that's a different point to what GP was making. It wasn't that children answer differently to adults, it's that they get it 'right' more often than adults. Which is still more about ignorance allowing them to make the same assumptions as the questioner than thought processes. A child might not even be aware that people in other countries might drive on the other side of the road, and so be sure of their 'correct' answer, but most adults know that without knowing the location of this image, the question can't be answered. EDIT: And if the question weren't ambiguous, you'd basically be telling people the answer, since as soon as you say "assume it's in the US", you give a massive clue that bilateral asymmetry is relevant.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  That bus example is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Spoiler follows: The solution is supposedly that in countries where you drive on the right-hand side of the road, children immediately deduce that the bus is traveling to the left. This seems nonsensical to me because it's not even clear the bus is on a road, or it it is, that it's on the far side of the road. As far as I can tell, the bus is in a dirt field. Or if it's a dirt road, there clearly seems to be enough space for another bus to pass behind it. And since there are no citations, I actually don't even believe it. I've seen enough completely made-up statistics on LinkedIn blogs that unless there's a link to a study, at this point I assume the authors are just making sh*t up.
  - strbean 2y ago
    The rationale they provide is that you can't see the door to the bus. So we are looking at the driver's side of the bus. Ignore "Which was is the bus going?" and instead ask "Which side is the front of the bus?" And, knowing that we are looking at the driver's side because of the absence of doors, the answer depends on which side of the road the bus is designed to be driven on.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Oh is that supposed to be the rationale? I mean I can't even tell. Because no bus looks the way the bus in the image looks. I've never in my life seen a bus where the windshield was the same size and shape as the back window. Never in my life seen a bus that didn't have brake lights or turn signals. And so forth. In other words, there are so many things wrong with the "bus" that I don't know why you'd assume that if the "artist" had drawn it from the other side they would have bothered to include a door.
      - piperswe 2y ago
        Indeed, my assumption was that this was some simplified drawing of a bus that didn't have doors in the first place
      - smeej 2y ago
- smokel 2y ago
  I tried to find some source for this, but could not trace it back further than a YouTube video from 2016 [1], which is very light on details, to say the least. This kind of "research" does not really warrant the amount of inspirational blog posts that has resulted from it. In fact, as an adult I tend to reject 80% of these stories as nonsense. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKR4A8a4lw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKR4A8a4lw
- underyx 2y ago
  I think in the US kids use buses (school buses) at a higher rate than adults. The bus in the image is also colored yellow, just like school buses. Perhaps it has more to do with kids just having more recent experiences solving the same problem in real life?
- tempestn 2y ago
  Huh, it seems to me that realizing buses have doors on the side adjacent to the edge of the road is more an example of crystallized intelligence than fluid.
- cdrini 2y ago
  I'm not sure I think this illustrates different types of intelligences. For me, looking at the image, I have to suspend disbelief about a lot of things. This is a very simplified picture of a bus, lots of elements are missing/unrealistic, so I have to try to determine what missing things are part of the puzzle and which things are just coincidence. I think children would not be able to suspend their disbelief as quickly, and will instead immediately map the image to the real world object. They don't notice that the back bumper and the front bumper are identical (which they shouldn't be) or that the back window and the front window are identical (which they shouldn't be). So looking at this image, I decided "ok so this isn't meant to be a real bus, it's some sort of puzzle, so let me look for clues about it's direction of motion." That first part, "this isn't meant to be a real bus", is the piece that causes the difference, I believe. It's that thinking that makes it difficult to think "well what's on the other side of the bus?", because who knows, this bus doesn't have real world bumpers who knows if it has real world doors. As an adult, we can abstract and reason about a theoretical bus that might not have doors, whereas I think a child would connect that to the concrete bus and have difficulty abstracting.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  I actually did have trouble with that bus image. However it’s not as though adults make this trade-off for no gain. Ask a 6-year old to spot a bird in a tree a hundred feet away and they’ll be looking around everywhere for it simply because they don’t know what they’re looking for. An adult knows exactly what to look for: a dark shape in the branches moving separately from the motion of the branches in the wind behind it, briefly silhouetted against the sky while those same branches move, probably 30 ft or higher off the ground (depending on the size of the tree, of course). You probably even know instinctively what size of thing you’re looking for based on your knowledge of the apparent angular size of a bird at a given distance you’re also instinctively able to estimate.
mock-possum 2y ago
I think that’s it - they know they don’t know the ‘right’ way to draw sound, so instead of just doing whataver occurs to them, they wait, for fear of doing it ‘wrong.’ The concept that the only ‘wrong’ thing to do is to do nothing is a real important thing to internalize as an adult - not always where professional work is concerned, but nearly always where artistic pursuits are concerned. You’re doing it ‘right’ if you’re doing it.
barrenko 2y ago
Well, adults are RLHF'ed kids.
anonymous_sorry 2y ago
As a kid I instinctively associated different days of the week with colours. This is a form of synaesthesia. As an adult I never think this way, and even when I try can only even remember one of the colour associations (Friday was orange). My cod-biological explanation is that a child's brain is still forming connections and the process of becoming an adult involves pruning many of these connections to become more focused and efficient.
- anbardoi 2y ago
  While reading this comment, I was thinking "tuesday is blue, friday? Definitely orange" and then read you saying (Friday was orange) a split second later
  - automatic6131 2y ago
    +1 for tuesday being blue. Is Wednesday green?
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      If Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is green, and Friday is orange then it would makes sense that Thursday is yellow, Monday is violet, Sunday is indigo and Saturday is red... Nature abhors a vacuum, but it loves a rainbow.
  - jspash 2y ago
    Tuesday rhymes with blue. Not to mention "Blue Tuesday" is a phrase used quite often. You might be associating orange with Friday because it makes you think of the sun and going outdoors? It's all very interesting. Even more so because I don't think of days/colours. My mind gives the days size and mass. ie. starting with Sunday (I'm American) the day is small. And as the week progresses the days get larger, heavier and denser. Until Saturday, which is a big fat puffy ball of "day". You can do what you want with it and it will just be there and be your friend. I love Saturdays.
  - redman25 2y ago
    Hmm, my first thought was that Friday was purple. Tuesday is definitely blue though.
npteljes 2y ago
I'd say that adults worry, and that's because they are explicitly taught as children to label such behavior nonsense and discard it.
mistermann 2y ago
My theory is that a lot of capabilities remain in the hardware stack, but they are made inaccessible by the software stack (culture mainly, but also that type of media we consume, which can act as a catalyst...or not, if the right kind isn't present/popular).

I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drinking alcohol!

sethammons 2y ago

If you take this picture and ask adults and kids which way the bus is traveling, kids get it right more often than adults https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adults-fail-kids-pass-simple-bailey-mlod https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-way-bus-going-why-adult... Spoilers: adults prune information for more efficient processing and in doing so lose information

mopierotti 2y ago
I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors. Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack of knowledge. (Of levels of abstraction in representation and of vehicle design.) That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the underlying point being made.
- janniehater 2y ago
  [dead]
- soared 2y ago
  Or because kids are very familiar with busses and adults are not.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Interestingly I got it instantly but I’ve used busses far more in my adult life than as a child
  - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
    Why would kids be more familiar with busses than adults?
    - xattt 2y ago
      > Why are [large vehicles] so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/megafauna-mecha-fauna-machines-nature/ https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
      - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
        I don’t see the correlation, sorry! I’d expect an adult to be more familiar with a bus by virtue of having taken the bus more often than a child. Whether or not that’s exciting or just a mundane commute shouldn’t affect familiarity.
    - I_am_uncreative 2y ago
      School buses are a staple of childhood, at least in the US.
- cnasc 2y ago
  Yeah, this bus is clearly intended to be a school bus but it’s missing too much detail. If the absence of the door is a valid clue, then so is the absence of the big red stop sign that is on the non-door-side.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Lay off the copium - busses don’t have red stop signs everywhere (for example they don’t have them here) But they always have doors…
    - defrost 2y ago
      The other day someone pointed at the open platform of RM1353 and asked me: did you take the doors off this bus? “No, it was built that way.” She looked amazed, and pleased. https://www.theredbus.co.uk/blog/platform-sharing https://www.theredbus.co.uk/blog/platform-sharing
    - asddubs 2y ago
      they also always have mirrors, which is the first thing an adult would probably look for (since it applies more universally to vehicles)
  - phist_mcgee 2y ago
    Big red stop sign? Like on the bus?
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  Isn't this exactly the point? You look at this the analytical way, decide the bus doesn't have enough detail to be a realistic representation and stop there, maybe looking around for other clues. A very good example imo. Sure, the bus could be in reverse, but it could also be a British bus driving in the US. Or we could be looking at a reflection of the bus. Or we could be looking at the reflection of a British bus going in reverse. This is not about determining the direction with 100% certainty. This is about having a clue at all which you can justify, which adults mostly don't.
- anonymous_sorry 2y ago
  I don't think the point is to nitpick how realistic the representation is or how fair the question is. The point is children react to the question differently from the way adults do. And that's true despite (or perhaps because of) what an adult thinks of the question.
  - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
    But that's a different point to what GP was making. It wasn't that children answer differently to adults, it's that they get it 'right' more often than adults. Which is still more about ignorance allowing them to make the same assumptions as the questioner than thought processes. A child might not even be aware that people in other countries might drive on the other side of the road, and so be sure of their 'correct' answer, but most adults know that without knowing the location of this image, the question can't be answered. EDIT: And if the question weren't ambiguous, you'd basically be telling people the answer, since as soon as you say "assume it's in the US", you give a massive clue that bilateral asymmetry is relevant.
crazygringo 2y ago
That bus example is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Spoiler follows: The solution is supposedly that in countries where you drive on the right-hand side of the road, children immediately deduce that the bus is traveling to the left. This seems nonsensical to me because it's not even clear the bus is on a road, or it it is, that it's on the far side of the road. As far as I can tell, the bus is in a dirt field. Or if it's a dirt road, there clearly seems to be enough space for another bus to pass behind it. And since there are no citations, I actually don't even believe it. I've seen enough completely made-up statistics on LinkedIn blogs that unless there's a link to a study, at this point I assume the authors are just making sh*t up.
- strbean 2y ago
  The rationale they provide is that you can't see the door to the bus. So we are looking at the driver's side of the bus. Ignore "Which was is the bus going?" and instead ask "Which side is the front of the bus?" And, knowing that we are looking at the driver's side because of the absence of doors, the answer depends on which side of the road the bus is designed to be driven on.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Oh is that supposed to be the rationale? I mean I can't even tell. Because no bus looks the way the bus in the image looks. I've never in my life seen a bus where the windshield was the same size and shape as the back window. Never in my life seen a bus that didn't have brake lights or turn signals. And so forth. In other words, there are so many things wrong with the "bus" that I don't know why you'd assume that if the "artist" had drawn it from the other side they would have bothered to include a door.
    - piperswe 2y ago
      Indeed, my assumption was that this was some simplified drawing of a bus that didn't have doors in the first place
    - smeej 2y ago
smokel 2y ago
I tried to find some source for this, but could not trace it back further than a YouTube video from 2016 [1], which is very light on details, to say the least. This kind of "research" does not really warrant the amount of inspirational blog posts that has resulted from it. In fact, as an adult I tend to reject 80% of these stories as nonsense. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKR4A8a4lw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKR4A8a4lw
underyx 2y ago
I think in the US kids use buses (school buses) at a higher rate than adults. The bus in the image is also colored yellow, just like school buses. Perhaps it has more to do with kids just having more recent experiences solving the same problem in real life?
tempestn 2y ago
Huh, it seems to me that realizing buses have doors on the side adjacent to the edge of the road is more an example of crystallized intelligence than fluid.
cdrini 2y ago
I'm not sure I think this illustrates different types of intelligences. For me, looking at the image, I have to suspend disbelief about a lot of things. This is a very simplified picture of a bus, lots of elements are missing/unrealistic, so I have to try to determine what missing things are part of the puzzle and which things are just coincidence. I think children would not be able to suspend their disbelief as quickly, and will instead immediately map the image to the real world object. They don't notice that the back bumper and the front bumper are identical (which they shouldn't be) or that the back window and the front window are identical (which they shouldn't be). So looking at this image, I decided "ok so this isn't meant to be a real bus, it's some sort of puzzle, so let me look for clues about it's direction of motion." That first part, "this isn't meant to be a real bus", is the piece that causes the difference, I believe. It's that thinking that makes it difficult to think "well what's on the other side of the bus?", because who knows, this bus doesn't have real world bumpers who knows if it has real world doors. As an adult, we can abstract and reason about a theoretical bus that might not have doors, whereas I think a child would connect that to the concrete bus and have difficulty abstracting.
nkrisc 2y ago
I actually did have trouble with that bus image. However it’s not as though adults make this trade-off for no gain. Ask a 6-year old to spot a bird in a tree a hundred feet away and they’ll be looking around everywhere for it simply because they don’t know what they’re looking for. An adult knows exactly what to look for: a dark shape in the branches moving separately from the motion of the branches in the wind behind it, briefly silhouetted against the sky while those same branches move, probably 30 ft or higher off the ground (depending on the size of the tree, of course). You probably even know instinctively what size of thing you’re looking for based on your knowledge of the apparent angular size of a bird at a given distance you’re also instinctively able to estimate.

mock-possum 2y ago

I think that’s it - they know they don’t know the ‘right’ way to draw sound, so instead of just doing whataver occurs to them, they wait, for fear of doing it ‘wrong.’ The concept that the only ‘wrong’ thing to do is to do nothing is a real important thing to internalize as an adult - not always where professional work is concerned, but nearly always where artistic pursuits are concerned. You’re doing it ‘right’ if you’re doing it.

barrenko 2y ago

Well, adults are RLHF'ed kids.

anonymous_sorry 2y ago

As a kid I instinctively associated different days of the week with colours. This is a form of synaesthesia. As an adult I never think this way, and even when I try can only even remember one of the colour associations (Friday was orange). My cod-biological explanation is that a child's brain is still forming connections and the process of becoming an adult involves pruning many of these connections to become more focused and efficient.

anbardoi 2y ago
While reading this comment, I was thinking "tuesday is blue, friday? Definitely orange" and then read you saying (Friday was orange) a split second later
- automatic6131 2y ago
  +1 for tuesday being blue. Is Wednesday green?
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    If Tuesday is blue, Wednesday is green, and Friday is orange then it would makes sense that Thursday is yellow, Monday is violet, Sunday is indigo and Saturday is red... Nature abhors a vacuum, but it loves a rainbow.
- jspash 2y ago
  Tuesday rhymes with blue. Not to mention "Blue Tuesday" is a phrase used quite often. You might be associating orange with Friday because it makes you think of the sun and going outdoors? It's all very interesting. Even more so because I don't think of days/colours. My mind gives the days size and mass. ie. starting with Sunday (I'm American) the day is small. And as the week progresses the days get larger, heavier and denser. Until Saturday, which is a big fat puffy ball of "day". You can do what you want with it and it will just be there and be your friend. I love Saturdays.
- redman25 2y ago
  Hmm, my first thought was that Friday was purple. Tuesday is definitely blue though.

npteljes 2y ago

I'd say that adults worry, and that's because they are explicitly taught as children to label such behavior nonsense and discard it.

mistermann 2y ago

My theory is that a lot of capabilities remain in the hardware stack, but they are made inaccessible by the software stack (culture mainly, but also that type of media we consume, which can act as a catalyst...or not, if the right kind isn't present/popular).