Creativity and Flexibility in Young Children's Use of External Cognitive Strategies

A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds (N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external metacognitive strategy and transfer it across contexts. Children watched as an experimenter demonstrated how to mark the location of a hidden prize, thus helping them successfully retrieve that prize in the future. Children were then given the opportunity to spontaneously adopt an external marking strategy across six test trials. Children who did so at least once were then introduced to a conceptually similar but structurally distinct transfer task. Although most 3-year-olds deployed the demonstrated strategy in the initial test phase, none of them modified that strategy to solve the transfer task. By contrast, many children aged 4 years and older spontaneously devised more than one previously unseen reminder-setting strategy across the six transfer trials, with this tendency increasing with age. From age 6, children deployed effective external strategies on most trials, with the number, combination, and order of unique strategies used varying widely both within and across the older age groups. These results demonstrate young children's remarkable flexibility in the transferral of external strategies across contexts and point to pronounced individual differences in the strategies children devise.