There are a number of fascinating and challenging questions that need to be answered to attain an elaborated model of children’s thinking, for example: How do children aged 3 to 5 years perceive the world? How do they categorize things? What theories have children about the world? How do they solve problems? Are they able to infer and to understand someone’s intentions, feelings, desires, or knowledge about a particular thing or situation? Although considerable progress has been made in documenting the development of such thinking skills, many questions remain unsolved, and the application of the available knowledge in educational domains is still at the beginning. The latter may result from the common assumption that young children spontaneously engage in activities that spur their cognitive development, and that it is not reasonable to step into this process.

Why should children “learn to think”?

There are numerous arguments that encourage us to study children’s thinking, and we believe that these are good arguments for systematically supporting and teaching children in the art of thinking.

• There is a lot of evidence that in the first four years of life, tremendous changes occur in the brain. These processes go hand in hand with broad changes in cognitive, emotional, social, and motivational experience, as well as in behaviour, i.e., in the way the child interacts with its environment. It is fairly plausible to conceive that fundamental thinking operators are established during this period, and that the broader and the more elaborated the cognitive repertoire is, the easier the child can cope with new situations and problems.
• Young children are very curious about, interested in, eager for, and motivated to learn new things. They have a lot of fun in learning new things, and they experience learning as a fairly positive reward.
• There are sensitive periods in child development, where children can learn things much easier than in later periods of life.
• Not all children are growing up in a supportive and socially intact setting, and some children show cognitive deficits which might influence the development of thinking skills. Such weaknesses should be recognized and compensated as early as possible in order to prevent persistent disadvantages in later life.
• There is evidence that a financial investment in early childhood education is much more efficient than in later educational periods (school, university, etc.).
• In knowledge-based societies, information is virtually unlimited (e.g. via the internet). Thinking becomes more and more important for searching, assessing, judging, compiling, synthesizing, and analysing the given information, in order to refine information to useable and meaningful knowledge.
• The growing complexity in our society and the increasing tendency for a knowledge-based economy make thinking a key competence.

According to the Parmenides Foundation’s basic assumption, complex thinking can be decomposed into a small set of thinking operations. We suppose that most of the observable thinking patterns can be recombined by four fundamental operations. We termed this assumption the C4 hypothesis (the first letter of each operation is always a “C”). We assume that complex thinking always requires:

• to compare and evaluate given information (comparing: objects, alternatives, thoughts, options, situations, etc.) – comparative mode (C1),
• to deduce rules from given information. That is, if … then … statements are extracted in order to understand the relations between the constituents of the situation – conditional mode (C2),
• to understand causal relations. That is, it is necessary to apprehend the relationship between cause, effect, and the “hidden force” that intervenes between cause and effect. This operation allows gaining deeper insights in the processes occurring and controlling the world, and enables us to make predictions for upcoming events. This holds true for both the social and the physical domain – causal mode (C3),
• to appropriately reduce and re-configure complex information. That is, building new configurations, chunks, or clusters from the given information, in order to see new patterns, or underlying laws in the apparently unstructured or confusing information – constellatory mode (C4).

We further assume that the C1, C2, and C3 operators build a hierarchically ordered structure. From a cognitive perspective, C1 is the most basic and simplest operator while C3 is the most demanding. The C4 operator builds an orthogonal dimension. It is conceivable that the C4 operator spans a continuum from simple perceptual grouping processes (Gestalt laws) to complex conceptual re-grouping processes (insight problem solving). Thinking, according to this model, consists of the collaboration of these four basic operations. We assume that the C4 operators are established in early childhood.

The ‘Learning to Think’ project aims at finding evidence for the existence of a small set of basic thinking operations that build the fundament of complex thinking skills. In the context of the C4 hypothesis, it is for example plausible that especially the age of four years might be an interesting period to study the prerequisites of higher cognition. From neuroscientific studies we know that the full implementation of a theory of mind (ToM) is assigned to this period. ToM, the ability to understand the mental states of another person, might be especially interesting in the context of the development of the C3 operator. We hypothesize that the educational program systematically improves fundamental thinking skills in young children, resulting in significant changes in standardized behavioural and physiological parameters of cognitive performance. We designed child-oriented games to foster the C4 operations. These games are carried out with children in Kindergartens over periods of about three months. The effects of this intervention are assessed by means of behavioural and neurophysiological measurements. 

What are the procedures of ‘Learning to Think’?

The training consists of different modules. The modules either systematically train a particular C-operation (e.g. find a rule in a given problem) or require the successive combination of C-operations, e.g. when children have to solve a complex problem that first requires to understand the given constellation (C4), then to understand the intention of the actors (C3), and finally to extract the rules the actor is applying (C2). Each module is designed as a child-oriented game – addressing and respecting the needs and desires of young children. The tests and our training are performed in educational settings (in the kindergarten).

A cognitive test battery is performed before and after the training. It consists of a number of standardized tests (IQ, ToM, verbal abilities, working memory, executive functions) and aims to quantify possible training effects. Additionally, potential training-related changes in the children´s behaviour (e.g., amount and content of questions, social behaviour, academic self-concept) are assessed via parents and educator questionnaires. Furthermore, in the near future the training will be accompanied by neurophysiological experiments in the lab in order to study the ongoing spatial and temporal processes, reconfigurations and changes. We intend to use a non-invasive imaging technique (near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)) and EEG. The NIRS method is a new technique that enables us to identify task-specific patterns of brain activation by making use of the fact that blood reflects and absorbs light. The NIRS method is not harmful for the maturing brain, as the emitted light is not stronger than sunlight. EEG recordings provide us with a high temporal resolution of the ongoing processes.

We are confident that combining NIRS, EEG and behavioural data will help to develop refined models of cognitive development, as well as increasingly refined tools to foster young children’s cognitive abilities in everyday educational settings.