 Complex problem solving is usually not considered the stuff of child's play, but Berkeley researchers have found that young children are better than adults at figuring out how some things work. In a study using simple shapes and a musical light box, children showed a stronger ability to predict cause and effect, in this case, what's causing the box to play. For a long time, we thought that babies and young children had all these problems reasoning logically or thinking clearly or understanding cause and effect. And what we've been showing empirically is that that's just the opposite is true, that even the very youngest babies already can do things unconsciously like analyze statistics or draw causal inferences. Researchers asked both children and adults to figure out which objects were blickets, ones that would activate the blicketness machine. First they were given training showing which single or combination of objects would work, then they were tested with a more ambiguous set of circumstances. The children were much more successful than the adults in predicting which objects were most likely to be the blickets. These children unconsciously are making inferences, drawing conclusions, solving problems the same way in many ways that a very intelligent scientist would. But they're not self-conscious about it, they couldn't tell you that that was what they were doing. Do you think that cylinder is a blicket or not a blicket? No, not a blicket. The children were unconsciously more capable of abstract thinking, more willing to accept unusual possibilities for how the machine was activated. Researchers theorized that the adults tended to ignore the training that didn't match their prior assumptions, reverting to their preconceived notions about how things work. When it comes to actually acting in the world and doing things grown-ups are much better than children, you know children have a hard time tying their shoes. But when it comes to learning and particularly when it comes to exploring lots of unusual alternatives, we actually have some reason to believe that children may be better at doing that than the adults are. While children still may have a lot to learn about the world, adults may want to take a cue from kids about how to become better learners. At UC Berkeley, I'm Roxanne Makashian.