No guts, no glory: underestimating the benefits of providing children with mechanistic details

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-021-00108-5

Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children’s ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children?

Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure to mechanism benefits children via the formation of abstract causal knowledge that supports epistemic evaluation.

We tested 240 6–9 year-olds’ memory for concrete details and the ability to distinguish expertise before, immediately after, or a week after viewing a video about how combustion engines work.

By around age 8, children who saw the video remembered mechanistic details and were better able to detect car-engine experts. Beyond detailed knowledge, the current results suggest that children also acquired an abstracted sense of how systems work that can facilitate epistemic reasoning.

As predicted, children learned the names and movement of car-engine parts from the seven-minute video.

However, contrary to our expectations, children remembered these details a week later, demonstrating impressive long-term retention of mechanistic details.

Both immediately after viewing the video and a week later, children became better at detecting car-engine experts, with the older children in our sample showing the most improvement.

Importantly, successfully choosing the expert in the current task relies on concepts implied but never explicitly mentioned in the video, suggesting that children retained an understanding of the underlying causal patterns in addition to mechanistic details.