Ninety-seven children aged 4–11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second phase, maps were presented on rotatable turntables, thus allowing children to manually align all maps and alleviate mental rotation demand. From age six onwards, children showed strong evidence of both mentally rotating misaligned maps in phase 1 and manually aligning them in phase 2. Older children used this form of cognitive offloading more frequently, which substantially improved performance and eliminated the individual differences observed in phase 1.

中文翻译：

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儿童通过一种新颖的卸载技术提高他们的认知能力

97 名 4-11 岁的儿童（49 名男性，48 名女性，大部分是白人）有机会通过设计和实施一种新的认知卸载策略来提高他们解决问题的能力。在两个阶段中，他们使用与搜索空间对齐或未对齐的地图来搜索隐藏的奖励。第二阶段，地图呈现在可旋转的转盘上，让孩子们手动对齐所有地图，缓解脑力旋转需求。从 6 岁开始，儿童在第 1 阶段表现出心理旋转错位地图和在第 2 阶段手动对齐它们的有力证据。年龄较大的儿童更频繁地使用这种形式的认知卸载，这大大提高了表现并消除了第 1 阶段观察到的个体差异.