Children can be systematic problem-solvers at younger ages

'm in a coffee shop when a young child dumps out his mother's bag in search of fruit snacks.

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The contents spill onto the table, bench and floor. It's a chaotic - but functional - solution to the problem. Children have a penchant for unconventional thinking that, at first glance, can look disordered. This kind of apparently chaotic behavior served as the inspiration for developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's best-known theory: that children construct their knowledge through experience and must pass through four sequential stages, the first two of which lack the ability to use structured logic.

Piaget remains the GOAT of developmental psychology. He fundamentally and forever changed the world's view of children by showing that kids do not enter the world with the same conceptual building blocks as adults, but must construct them through experience. No one before or since has amassed such a catalog of quirky child behaviors that researchers even today can replicate within individual children.

While Piaget was certainly correct in observing that children engage in a host of unusual behaviors, my lab recently uncovered evidence that upends some longstanding assumptions about the limits of children's logical capabilities that originated with his work. Our new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour describes how young children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction.