Do you think children learn faster than adults? A paper proves you right

If you've ever felt like your elementary school child is "smarter" than you, or at least quicker to acquire new information and skills, a new study in contemporary biology suggests you're absolutely right
.
The new study also provides a reason: Children and adults showed differences in a type of brain messenger called GABA, which stabilizes newly learned material
.

Takeo Watanabe of Brown University said: "Our findings suggest that primary school-age children learn more than adults in a certain amount of time, which makes children learn more
efficiently.
"

Their findings suggest that GABA levels in children increase
rapidly after visual training ends.
This is in stark contrast to GABA concentrations in adults, which remain constant
.
The findings suggest that children's brains respond to training that allow them to stabilize new knowledge
more quickly and effectively.

"It is often assumed that children learn more efficiently than adults, although scientific support for this hypothesis is weak at best, and if this is true, the neural mechanisms responsible for more effective learning in children are unclear
," Watanabe said.

The GABA difference is an obvious place
to look for answers.
While previous studies have existed, the researchers noted that GABA in children had only been
measured at one point in time.
Nor is it measured in time that has any special significance in terms of learning
.

So in the new study, they set out to see how GABA levels changed before, during, and after learning
.
They also want to understand the differences between
children and adults.

The study examined visual learning in elementary school-age children and adults using behavioral and state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques
.
The study found that visual learning triggered an increase
in GABA in the children's visual cortex, a brain region that processes visual information.
After the training session, the increase in GABA also lasted for a few minutes
.

The results they saw were markedly different
in adults who received the same visual training.
In adults, there are no changes
in GABA.

The findings predict that training on the new program will rapidly increase the concentration of GABA in children and quickly stabilize learning
.
Further experiments confirmed this
.

Sebastian M.
Frank of the University of Regensburg in Germany said: "In subsequent behavioral experiments, we found that children do stabilize new knowledge faster than adults, which is consistent with
the common belief that children are superior to adults in terms of learning ability.
" "Therefore, our findings suggest that GABA is a key factor
in improving children's learning efficiency.
"

They say the findings suggest that children may acquire new knowledge and skills
faster than adults.
The government should further encourage teachers and parents to give children more opportunities to learn new skills, whether it is learning multiplication tables or cycling
.

The findings could also change neuroscientists' perception
of children's brain maturity.

"Our findings suggest that although inhibitory failure has been observed in other domains such as cognitive control or attention, children exhibit efficient inhibition and GABA-capable processing
," Frank said.
"This means that GABAergic processing involving different aspects of cognitive function may mature
at different rates.
"

"Although children's brains are not yet fully mature and many of their behavioral and cognitive functions are not as effective as adults, in general, children are not more capable than adults
," Watanabe said.
"Conversely, at least in some areas such as visual learning, children are better than adults
.
"

In future studies, they say, differences in maturation rates between brain regions and function should be studied in detail
.
They also wanted to explore how GABA responds to other types of learning, such as reading and writing
.