Children often perform worse than adults on tasks that require focused attention. While this is commonly regarded as a sign of incomplete cognitive development, a broader attentional focus could also endow children with the ability to find novel solutions to a given task. To test this idea, we investigated children’s ability to discover and use novel aspects of the environment that allowed them to improve their decision-making strategy. Participants were given a simple choice task in which the possibility of strategy improvement was neither mentioned by instructions nor encouraged by explicit error feedback. Among 47 children (8—10 years of age) who were instructed to perform the choice task across two experiments, 27.5% showed a full strategy change. This closely matched the proportion of adults who had the same insight (28.2% of n = 39). The amount of erroneous choices, working memory capacity and inhibitory control, in contrast, indicated substantial disadvantages of children in task execution and cognitive control. A task difficulty manipulation did not affect the results. The stark contrast between age-differences in different aspects of cognitive performance might offer a unique opportunity for educators in fostering learning in children.

The development of cognitive control functions in children is known to be protracted. Children have particular difficulties to execute instructed tasks in a fast and error-free manner, and these problems have been linked to the slow development of attention, inhibitory control and working memory functions that rely on prefrontal brain regions. In the present study, we investigated children's ability to discover and implement improvements of their task strategy without instruction. In contrast to the widely-described problems with efficient task execution, we find children to be as likely as adults to spontaneously discover and implement a task strategy improvement that was neither mentioned by instructions nor encouraged by explicit error feedback. Across two experiments involving 40 children of 8 -- 10 years and 39 adults aged between 20 and 35, we found that statistically indistinguishable proportions of 35\% of children and 28\% of adults discovered and used an alternative strategy that made task execution easier. This lack of detectable age differences in flexible strategy updating stood in stark contrast to substantial differences in task-execution, working memory, and inhibitory control found in the same sample. Our results suggest a previously unappreciated early development of a higher cognitive ability that presumably depends on the competitive interaction of several slowly developing cognitive control functions.