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Surprise encourages exploration

09.04.2015

Philosophers say that knowledge of the world begins with wonder. Does this mean, speaking in a more mundane language, that the effectiveness of learning will be higher if the objects around us begin to behave differently than they should? Indeed, it is, and surprise helps to learn and explore the world, starting from a very early age, when a person has not yet mastered speech.

Psychologists from Johns Hopkins University conducted several experiments with 11-month-old children in which children had to observe the behavior of ordinary toys (balls, cars, etc.). But only in one case, the behavior of objects was consistent with the usual physics, and in the other, objects suddenly began to behave in a completely incomprehensible way. For example, a toy car rolling down a toy hill towards some kind of obstacle did not rest against it, but passed through.

In an article in Science, the authors write that when faced with an unusual situation, children better remembered the properties of the object. That is, a car that just drove down a hill was less lingering in memory than a car that went through a wall. Moreover, the strange behavior of the object encouraged the children to actively explore it: for example, they began to beat the same typewriter on the table, as if testing its strength and hardness. If the object suddenly hung in the air, instead of falling, as it should be, then the child also began to test it, dropping it from a height.

It can be said that the children behaved like scientists, trying to reproduce the strange properties of the object that they had observed before. And even new toys that the child had not yet seen aroused less interest than an incomprehensible situation.

It is known that a person from an early age has a certain minimum of necessary knowledge about the world around him. So, a few years ago, an article was published in the journal WIREs Cognitive Science, which stated that babies can operate with elementary physics. For example, two-month-old babies understand that an unsecured object can fall, and an object that has disappeared from view still continues to exist somewhere; by five months, they have an understanding of the differences between solids and loose or fluid substances; and ten-month-olds are aware of the difference between "less" and "more" (although "less" and "more" are categories more logical-mathematical than physical). It is obvious that such knowledge does not remain in the head as a passive load, but is actively used - what the child sees around him, he checks with the usual rules.

It is also surprising that surprise (sorry for the tautology) encourages even such young children, who are not yet a year old and who have not yet learned to speak, to actively explore the world around them. One can only regret that in many adults this property of the psyche disappears somewhere without a trace.

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