Cognitive offloading by children in perceptual discrimination tasks

Abstract

Cognitive offloading occurs when an individual modifies a current decision scenario in a way that reduces the cognitive load or difficulty of a task. Children begin to engage in such offloading even before formal schooling begins. Using a manual rotation paradigm, preschool and elementary school children (3- to 9-years-old) were given perceptual discrimination tasks in which they had to compare two visual stimuli (either vertical and horizontal lines that intersected and they had to determine which was longer, or rectangular shapes or clip art animals that they had to compare to determine if the stimuli were the same or different). On some trials, offloading to the environment via rotation of one stimulus was beneficial to make the discrimination easier from the perspective of those stimuli aligning. Children in all age groups showed rotation of the various stimuli to make the task easier, although there was a developmental trend such that likelihood of accuracy and rotation increased with age. Additionally, children were more likely to rotate objects on difficult trials than easier ones and this often resulted in increases in accuracy. This tendency to rotate for the more difficult trials was associated with age. These results confirm that children can manipulate stimuli in ways that make comparing those stimuli easier, reflecting a form of (meta)cognitive offloading using the external environment to resolve internal uncertainty.