High Cognitive Minds

There’s a kind of morbid fascination, for me, in seeing the many ways in which psychology fails to come anywhere near being a science. Educational psychology, in particular, suffers from researchers’ biases that wouldn’t be tolerated in other areas. And one of the most common biases is for the researchers to think they know what they’re seeing.

Eide Neurolearing Blog’s most recent entry centers on the Cookie Thief test. “When you show this picture to adults and ask them to describe it, the usual response is a dry recitation of what people, objects, and events are being seen in the picture.

“But in many kids (often creative ones, young engineers, artists, or gifted storytellers), we get the most insightful, charming, and sometimes downright devious responses.”

The assumption here is that adults have lost the ability to think outside the box. The Eides ask: “Why is it that kids seems so much better at out-of-the-box thinking compared to adults? One reason may be that common expectations of becoming adults include become more organized, being able to plan and anticipate more events, and become more consistent in our behaviors.”

But I can think of at least two reasons that have nothing to do with supposed losses. The first, and probably the most important, is that adults have learned to respond to tests in the most factual, straightforward way. Unless they were told that they were expected to tell a story based on the picture, they would most likely assume that the tester wanted a description. They are experienced testees and have learned to respond as expected.

Second, story-telling is a particular talent, and one that not everybody is endowed with. The adult who fails to think creatively about a picture may be an extraordinarily creative and out-of-the-box thinker, but not necessarily in response to pictures.

This doesn’t negate the very real problem that most children do, in fact, lose their imaginative abilities for various reasons, including normal mind-numbing school curricula, and a media culture which provides such rich imaginative detail in such overwhelming abundance that children have no need to create anything for themselves.

The problem comes when remedies are based on faulty assumptions. Do the educational experts examine their assumptions when those remedies don’t work, or do they just go on to try something new based on new but equally faulty assumptions? Judging from the declining state of mass education, which has spent decades careering from one fad to another, I’d guess it’s the latter.