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Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, reports that children from as young as 8 months old through preschool explore through techniques that would seem familiar to any scientist: they make hypotheses and test them against data; predict outcomes using statistics, and can infer the causes of failed actions.

All of these things, Gopnik and her colleagues argue, happen years before any formal training in the same scientific techniques. "What we need to do to encourage children to learn is not to put them in the equivalent of school, tell them things, give them reading drills or flash cards. We really need to put them in a safe, rich environment where the natural capacities for exploration, for testing, for science can get free rein," she said in a briefing with reporters.