What Toddlers Teach Us About Doing Science

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Edward Hessler

In this 10-minute video, from the PBS series Closer to the Truth,  Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews cognitive psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik. In a way this conversation is about how humans have become so good at our capacity to do contemporary science in such a short period of time--just a few hundred years. 

Gopnik's  approach is to question babies, toddlers and young children to study this fascinating question. 

Gopnik is perhaps best known for advocating the 'theory theory,' "the idea that children develop and change intuitive theories of the world in much the same way that scientists do." Children and scientists are model builders and testers. She puts it this way in the video, ‘"It’s not that children are little scientists, it’s actually that scientists are big children."

h/t AEON