This article is from WeChat official account:阿肉阿团 (ID: yiqiuyiyang) , author: Yang Yang, editors: Bo Chao, Qiu days, typesetting: Yang Yang, head map from: “where is my father went to the fourth quarter” stills

Foreword

Have you ever been dumbfounded by your child’s stubbornness and lack of flexibility? Have you ever wondered why children sometimes think so flexible that people sigh with peculiar brain circuits, and sometimes they get stuck in a very simple place and can’t turn around? Are you troubled? Why do children have to read a picture book dozens of times and play a game for a few months?

Today, the little godmother of the meatball rice ball, Yang Yang, my school girl at Brown University, will tell you about the children’s flexibility of thinking. When you are dumbfounded by your children’s peculiar mistakes, you can also understand the reasons for their mistakes.

1. What exactly is flexibility?

Many people say that a child is a blank piece of paper, because the child’s thinking is flexible and unconstrained, with unlimited possibilities. Those of us who have been smoothed out by the years, often feel pleasantly surprised by the strangeness of their daily lives. This is also one of the biggest motivations when I do teaching research and development of children’s products. Every time my child is unexpected, I will feel endless joy, which also constantly inspires my design and thinking.

Most parents will be proud of this, hoping to take care of their children’s rich imagination and flexible little brains. However, sometimes we also have doubts, whether the child is a brainer or a dead brainer?

Repetition is more than just comfort, self-confidence, and poor happiness. In fact, repetition is also an important learning method for children. We adults find it boring because our neural connections have been well developed after years of repetition and practice. For children, each repetition is a process of strengthening neural connections and has different pleasures.

Some parents feel that I can accept the repetition, but I want the children to learn the same thing in a different way. In fact, this is not necessarily true. For example, some experiments have found that learning the same new word multiple times through the same picture book is better than learning each one from several picture books.

But it is undeniable that knowledge transfer is indeed very important, which is also a major cause of anxiety for parents: even if the child repeats it, and still does not accept the new activity I propose, can he teach it? In fact, this “cannot transfer focus” issue is the real issue of flexibility. The lack of flexibility in this area is a problem for young children and even adolescents. It is a normal stage of human growth and does not mean that children cannot teach.

Today, let’s introduce in detail the things of cognitive flexibility.

Second, why flexible conversion is so difficult

01 Flexibility does not only challenge children

These flexibility problems faced by children are mainly related to their executive function (executive function), which can be simply understood as children’s view Problem, problem-solving ability. Some parents may have heard of this term, but it can actually be, In order to infer the meaning of the birth word. Even if it is not a new word, it may have different meanings in the context. We need to switch our focus flexibly to grasp it accurately. For example, the following “payment method” topic.

Of course, this question itself is not very friendly to children in the current digital payment era, and the children’s answer cannot be said to be wrong, strictly speaking. However, the specific amount of money given in the combined question is enough to make people think that this is probably a question related to numbers.

It can be said that cognitive flexibility is a very important ability. It not only allows us to be more flexible in our daily life, but also allows us to connect knowledge in learning and apply the knowledge learned in different fields. But as we have seen above, it is difficult for children. And these “mistakes” may seem like the child is disobedient, unable to teach, or not working hard enough or being overly careless.

But in fact, we adults ourselves do not fully grasp cognitive flexibility. Therefore, before disgusting children, let’s take a look at our own level. Let me ask you: How do you play poker?

When you fight landlords or Texas Hold’em, are you the one who can quickly discover various combinations as soon as you get the cards? Can you adjust your strategy in time according to the progress of the situation, dismantle the combination of cards you originally envisioned, and form a more favorable combination to deal with the current situation of the masters?

If not, then at least your cognitive flexibility is not enough when it comes to playing cards. So you should be able to imagine,Cognitive flexibility is not simple. In the rule design of playing cards, it depends on the size of the numbers and the distinction of suits. Therefore, there can be many combinations and matching methods. Some need to be matched with the same suit, some need to be matched with the same number, and some require increasing numbers. Need a specific number of cards to match together. As an amateur poker player, I often find that my cards have better combinations after playing a game.

The brain-burning brought to us by poker is the same as when children face the scene mentioned above, cognitive flexibility faces challenges.

02 What on earth is the child’s inflexibility?

As we said above, for children, the difficulty of cognitive flexibility lies in “flexible conversion”: how to switch from one rule to another, how to adapt in time when the situation changes, and when a path is unworkable Can you switch to another one in time?

This “flexible conversion” ability can be divided into two small parts, both “flexible” and “conversion”.

Let’s first look at the “conversion” itself. My child was playing cooking at first, can I invite them to pile up wood together? Children think that “grass” refers to plants. Can they realize its true meaning when they see the “draft” following the “Zhaozhou Bridge”?

The experiment found that even if the task that requires “conversion” is very simple, it is still difficult for children under four to complete this “conversion” when the pre-conversion and post-conversion tasks are very familiar.

In a classic card sorting experiment, children get four kinds of cards: red rabbit, blue rabbit, red boat, and blue boat. In other words, the variable has two dimensions, one is the item on the card, and the other is the color. The child’s task is to classify the cards in one dimension first, and then switch to another dimension. For example, the experimenter asks the children to sort the items on the card first, then “transform” them, and then re-sort them by color.

3-year-old children often look like this during this process:

The experimenter takes the time to carefully explain the rules of the shape game: the boat should put the box next to the boat, and the rabbit should put the box next to the rabbit

Then start the shape game:

After several rounds of this, the correct rate of children is basically online. The experimenter took the time to explain that instead of playing the shape game, he switched to the color game. The props are still the same, but the rules have changed: put the blue box on the blue box, and put the red box on the red box.

And also through asking questions, confirmed that the child understands this change:

But when the color game is officially started:

After repeating this, the child’s correct rate will be offline.

It’s not that sorting by color is more difficult for children. If you sort by color and then sort by shape, the same result will be the same. Some children even reminded the experimenter again that it is now a color game, not a shape game, and they are still classified according to shapes.

In other words, children are not flexible because the “transition” itself is a difficult problem for young children. Even if children are willing to switch and are very familiar with the tasks after the switch, the fact that they have to let go of the rules they already have in their minds and embrace the new rules may make their little brains unable to turn around.

The results of the above experiment show that the accuracy rate for a 3-year-old child is only about 40% after the rule changes; while a 4-year-old child has an accuracy rate of about 90%. Therefore, we can find that children between the ages of 3 and 4, the cognitive flexibility of “transition” is greatly improved. However, this is not the end, and it can even be said to be the starting point for the formal development of cognitive flexibility.

03 Give your children and yourself a little more security

For young children, “switching” is already difficult enough; and even more difficult is the “flexible” in “flexible switching”.

Take the color game and shape game above as examples. Assuming that the shape game is A and the color game is B, then the “transition” is the rule for successfully switching to B when the task changes from AAA to BBB. And “flexible” means that when the task is AABABBAB…, thinking about two rules at the same time, switching back and forth flexibly. This is a bit like when we play poker, we have to think about both suits and numbers.

If 3 or 4 year olds start to “transform”, then they must be around 11 years old to be able to “switch” skillfully like our adults, and they need to be around 15 years old to “flexibly switch”.

Harvard Education Professor Todd Rose(Todd Rose) has a golden sentence in his book “The End of Average”: “Learn new The hardest part of things is not to accept new ideas, but to let go of old ideas.”

So, when a child is unable to turn around something that seems very simple, and we can’t bear it and become frustrated, we can take a deep breath and tell ourselves: We are asking the child to let him go To switch to another set of rules already in the mind, and even ask the child to go back and forth between several rulesThe prefrontal cortex of the brain matures and strengthens. And this part will not fully mature until you are in your twenties. Think about you, who used to be a rookie in the workplace, have you also gotten into the horns?

Although normally speaking, we basically don’t have to worry about children’s cognitive flexibility, but because it can receive creativity, reading comprehension and review questions, you may still be curious about whether you can exercise and improve your children’s cognition. Know flexibility? Not for the chicken baby, just to make the children smarter. In fact, scientists nowadays are also very curious about this issue, and they have not yet concluded. It is not that the exercise methods they tested have no effect at all, but that they have not been able to prove that these effects can be well transferred to real life.

So unfortunately, I cannot recommend targeted training for everyone. But we can start from life and give our children “little stimulation” from time to time in our daily lives.

02 Improve in life

There are actually many opportunities to show flexibility in life, such as when we encounter various unexpected situations: the restaurant we want to go to is full, the snack we want to eat falls on the floor, etc. We adults can play a role as an example , Use your brain to think about how to solve the problem in another way. There are also various daily habits, and you can also add a little change. For example, you must walk along the cracks of the bricks on the way home, and the next time you encounter green tiles, you have to jump over. In terms of language flexibility, if you have a bit of humor, you can talk about jokes or homophonic stalks. These are flexible language arts.

However, for young children, parents need to pay special attention to the fact that “flexible” and “daily” are often in conflict. Toddlers need a relatively fixed schedule to have a sense of security and control. This is the foundation of all learning. When nervous and anxious, the child will immediately stop studying and use all his energy to fight anxiety. Therefore, on the basis of a fixed schedule and a sufficient sense of security for the child, some small changes can be added to help the child develop flexibility. Don’t get the priority wrong.

03 From another angle, each has its own merits

At the very beginning, I mentioned that the imagination and unconstrained nature of children are the driving force for my work. You may want to ask, since it is said throughout the article that children’s cognition is not flexible enough, are you suggesting that you are not motivated at work?

Actually, children have a huge advantage over adults. The “flexible conversion” we mentioned earlier is to replace old ideas with new ideas. Adults are indeed more “flexible” and more able to “convert”; but because children’s life experience is very limited, they often don’t need it at all. “Convert”! Most things themselves are new to children, and they are very good at discovering and accepting new things.

For example, some experiments have found that an unusual pattern can be found more accurately by children than adults, and boldly accept it and execute it. For adults, more experience limits our openness. When the laws of the things in front of us do not conform to our traditions and common sense, we may still choose to stick to the laws we are familiar with, even though it is not the same as what we see. The evidence does not match.

In fact, this is unavoidable. From a neuroscience point of view, the child’s brain is designed for learning, while the adult’s brain is designed for practical use. When children are two to three years old, the number of synaptic connections that transmit brain signals is more than twice that of adults. After that, the brain will gradually reduceThe number of connections, because a normal adult does not need that many connections. As the child grows up, the brain will gradually change from more comprehensive to more efficient. This is why children grow up to become more flexible, able to switch focus points, but also become inflexible and more hesitant about new things.

Every person’s characteristics are the result of the mutual influence of nature and nurture. Innate determines one part, and these inevitable physiological trends determine another part, which ultimately leaves us adults with room to intervene and play. In fact, there is not as much as many parents imagine. Therefore, as far as the education of young children is concerned, if you can’t understand children deeply and give them the guidance they really need, then it is better to just give them enough love and sense of security, and then let them explore and learn by themselves. After all, their own factory configuration is already at the peak of their learning ability.


References:

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Chevalier, N., and Blaye, A. (2009). Setting goals to switch between tasks: effect of cue transparency on children’s cognitive flexi, BS, Hains, SMJ, Lee. K., Xie, X., Huang, H., Ye, HH, Zhang, K., & Wang, Z. (2003). Effects of experience on voice recognition. Psychological Science, 14, 220-224.

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This article is from WeChat official account:阿肉阿团 (ID: yiqiuyiyang) , author: Yang Yang, editors: Bo Chao, Qiu days, typesetting: Yang Yang