Researchers looking at child development often use search-and-find tasks to look at the ways in which children apply what they are learning about the physical world. Tests carried out on toddlers reveal that something quite remarkable happens in child development between the ages of two and five – a stage identified by both educationalists and neuroscientists as critical to the capacity for learning.
Dr Sara Baker is a researcher into early childhood at the Faculty of Education. She is interested in the role of the brain’s prefrontal lobe in how young children learn to adapt their understanding to an ever-shifting environment. Many of her studies chart changes in children’s ways of thinking about the world. She uses longitudinal designs to examine the shape of individual children’s learning curves month by month.
Research by Baker and colleagues is contributing to an understanding of the acquisition of skills essential to learning. She explains: “The brain’s frontal lobe is one of the four major divisions of the cerebral cortex. It regulates decision-making, problem-solving and behaviour. We call these functions executive skills – they are at the root of the cognitive differences between humans and other animals. My executive functions enable me to resist a slice of cake when I know I’m soon having dinner.”
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Image: Frontal lobe
Credit: BodyParts3D/Anatomography
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Education and the brain: what happens when children learn?
11 February 2016
Have you lost your house keys recently? If so, you probably applied a spot of logical thinking. You looked first in the most obvious places – bags and pockets – and then mentally retraced your steps to the point when you last used them.