Kids Outsmart Grown-Ups: Berkeley Research

Preschoolers can be smarter than college students a...
t figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they're more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh.

In an experiment using simple shapes and a musical light box called a "blicketness machine," children showed a stronger ability to predict cause and effect -- in this case, which objects placed on the box were "blickets," causing the box to play. The children were much more successful than the adults in predicting which objects were most likely the "blickets."