A new study has suggested that children as young as age 2 spontaneously use mathematical concepts to learn things around them.
The study conducted at the University of Washington (UW) showed that toddlers could tell the difference between two different ways an experimenter played a game, with one strategy being more successful than the other.
Lead author Anna Waismeyer, a post-doctoral researcher at UW's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, asserted that in their study, they wanted to see if young children could detect the difference between two imperfect ways of winning a game, and then use the better strategy to their own advantage.
A cause-and-effect game was designed by the co-authors where the child watched as the researcher played and concluded that toddlers did not need to to go through trial and error to learn and they could just watch what other people did.
Andrew Meltzoff, a UW professor, asserted that remarkably, toddlers learned about causality even if the people they were watching make mistakes and were right some but not all of the time.
Waismeyer added that the current way of teaching probabilities relied on fractions and decimals, and many children struggled to understand these concepts when they were introduced in grade school.