Developmental origins of cognitive offloading.
Kristy L Armitage, Adam Bulley, Jonathan Redshaw
Proceedings. Biological sciences June 10, 2020 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.2927 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Experimental developmental study (two studies) Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 258 |
| Population | Children aged 4-11 years |
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Cognitive development Cognitive evolution Cognitive offloading Extended mind Metacognition |
| Key findings | Even the youngest children adjusted their use of an external strategy (manually rotating a turntable) to the level of mental rotation demand, paralleling the classic angle-of-rotation/reaction-time relationship. With increasing age, children became significantly more likely to offload only when doing so would benefit performance, suggesting that cognitive offloading strategies are gradually calibrated throughout childhood. |
Abstract
Many animals manipulate their environments in ways that appear to augment cognitive processing. Adult humans show remarkable flexibility in this domain, typically relying on internal cognitive processing when adequate but turning to external support in situations of high internal demand. We use calendars, calculators, navigational aids and other external means to compensate for our natural cognitive shortcomings and achieve otherwise unattainable feats of intelligence. As yet, however, the developmental origins of this fundamental capacity for cognitive offloading remain largely unknown. In two studies, children aged 4-11 years (n = 258) were given an opportunity to manually rotate a turntable to eliminate the internal demands of mental rotation--to solve the problem in the world rather than in their heads. In study 1, even the youngest children showed a linear relationship between mental rotation demand and likelihood of using the external strategy, paralleling the classic relationship between angle of mental rotation and reaction time. In study 2, children were introduced to a version of the task where manually rotating inverted stimuli was sometimes beneficial to performance and other times redundant. With increasing age, children were significantly more likely to manually rotate the turntable only when it would benefit them. These results show how humans gradually calibrate their cognitive offloading strategies throughout childhood and thereby uncover the developmental origins of this central facet of intelligence.
Comparable studies
Other experimental studies on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
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| Differential contributions of serotonergic and dopaminergic functional connectivity to the phenomenology of LSD Healthy adults | 2022 | Secondary analysis of experimental data | n = 15 |
| TMS-EEG and resting-state EEG applied to altered states of consciousness: oscillations, complexity, and phenomenology. | 2023 | Experimental study | |
| Training novice practitioners to reliably report their meditation experience using shared phenomenological dimensions. Novice meditation practitioners | 2019 | Neurophenomenological experiment |