Originally Posted by MegMeg
Back to my own experience, what I see in my kid is a skill at constructing mental models of a situation and playing around with hypotheses about how it works or how it might work under different conditions. This is a skill that is lacking in some of the grad students in my department's PhD program, and I can pretty much predict who will bomb out of the program based on it. It is absolutely essential for playing in the big leagues, and it cannot be taught. And I can see it in my 4-year-old, but I'm damned if I could figure out how to test for it.
*Yes*. Exactly. I too see PhD students who can't do this, when my own child has been able to do it for years. Weird, isn't it?

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