THURSDAY, Sept. 27 (HealthDay News) -- You may think your
toddler is just playing in the sand box, but she may really be
conducting a sophisticated scientific experiment and learning
something new every time she pours out another scoop of sand,
new research suggests. "Children have the same brains we do.
Everyone can learn from data and know if a hypothesis is good or
not," explained Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the
University of California, Berkeley. "Even babies and very young
children learn about the world in many of the ways that
scientists do. Only when children do experiments, we say
'they're getting into everything!'" Gopnik is the author of a
report in the Sept. 28 issue of Science that reviews previous
studies on how children learn. She said that in the past people
thought preschoolers were irrational and illogical. However,
during the 1980s and 1990s, researchers realized that young
children actually had coherent, structured thoughts and could
make causal inferences about the world ar