Over her decadeslong career as a developmental psychologist, Alison Gopnik has observed a striking phenomenon: When children are given a new toy without an obvious use, they often outperform high‑achieving college students in figuring out how it works. While adults tend to test the most likely possibilities and quickly get stuck, children respond with playful experimentation.

"What children are doing is exactly the kind of open-ended, non-utilitarian, exploratory learning that allows you to find out things about the world that you would never find out any other way,” says Gopnik, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Gopnik argues that human intelligence is not a single, general capacity, but a collection of distinct cognitive modes — exploration, exploitation and care — that are distributed across different stages of a person’s life. Childhood, she says, is evolution’s way of creating a dedicated “explorer” phase, made possible by a specialized care system provided by adults.

"The reason why we can have these big brains," she explains, "is because we have this period of childhood where we're protected ... and we have those older people who are there to provide the resources.”

Gopnik contrasts this biological model with current artificial intelligence, noting that while large language models excel at using existing data to predict patterns, it lacks the embodied, curiosity‑driven learning of a child. To create truly intelligent systems, she suggests that we need to focus on the “intelligence of care.”

“A system that develops, that changes over time, and in particular, a system that's cared for by humans or cared for by other intelligent agents — that's the secret of human intelligence,” she says. “That's the kind of system you'd need if you wanted a system that had the same kind of intelligence as humans.”

This lecture took place on Nov. 5, 2025, as part of the Berkeley Distinguished Faculty Lectures in the Social Sciences.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

UC Berkeley photo.

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