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rivka1. Alex's socks keep coming off, even when I put her shoes on to anchor them. Sometimes she takes them off on purpose, but she also has several pairs that just tend to fall off under normal playing conditions. Our house is very cold.
This afternoon, she picked up a fallen sock and handed it to me. Then she put her hand on her bare foot (the other still had a sock on it) and looked at me intently. Her meaning couldn't have been clearer, and it was certainly confirmed when - instead of immediately crawling away when I tried to put the sock on, as she normally does - she sat still and let me do it.
2. She was playing behind the gold chair, and I was sitting on the couch with my book.
"Where's Alex?" I called. She peeked around the corner of the chair and grinned at me, and I grinned back and said, "there she is!!"
That was pretty fun, so we repeated it a couple of times. Then she ducked behind the chair yet again. I obediently asked, "Where's my li'l baby?" And she crawled all the way around the other side of the chair to peek at me from the far side.
This time she laughed out loud, and so did I. Because probably humans have been pulling that trick for thousands of years, and today Alex invented it all by herself.
3. Someone gave her a bright pink hat. It's too big for her, but it's in one of her clothing bins anyway, and sometimes she'll pull it out. It has a bobble on top that seems to fascinate her. So she plays with it, and usually when she does I say something like, "Oh, there's your hat!"
Today she tried to put it on. And failed miserably, of course, because her dexterity is not the best and because squeezing your head into a knit stocking cap can be tricky. But here's the thing: she knew that it was supposed to go on her head, and she knew approximately how it worked - either because I've called it a hat before, or because she recognized that it was a hat.[1] Either way, that's pretty cool.
The thing about all three of these feats is that they are utterly trivial. They represent such elementary understandings that they barely seem like understandings at all. And yet, watching these achievements emerge in Alex, I'm also aware of how complex they are. To desire to wear socks, first you need to recognize the purpose of that tube of fabric lying on the floor. Then you need to understand, on some level, that wearing the sock will result in a warmer foot. (Before this, she's always seemed to regard socks as mere toys.) Then, assuming that you can't put the sock on yourself, you need to communicate your desire to someone else. Just handing me the sock wasn't enough - she hands me things all the time these days, and usually I say "thank you!" and either hand them back or put them down. She had to find a way to let me know what she wanted me to do with it. It's an astonishing chain of reasoning.
[1] She's quite good at recognizing what a hat is not. Or, at least, that's what I conclude from her mad cackling laughter when I put a cup on my head, or a book, or a rubber duck.
This afternoon, she picked up a fallen sock and handed it to me. Then she put her hand on her bare foot (the other still had a sock on it) and looked at me intently. Her meaning couldn't have been clearer, and it was certainly confirmed when - instead of immediately crawling away when I tried to put the sock on, as she normally does - she sat still and let me do it.
2. She was playing behind the gold chair, and I was sitting on the couch with my book.
"Where's Alex?" I called. She peeked around the corner of the chair and grinned at me, and I grinned back and said, "there she is!!"
That was pretty fun, so we repeated it a couple of times. Then she ducked behind the chair yet again. I obediently asked, "Where's my li'l baby?" And she crawled all the way around the other side of the chair to peek at me from the far side.
This time she laughed out loud, and so did I. Because probably humans have been pulling that trick for thousands of years, and today Alex invented it all by herself.
3. Someone gave her a bright pink hat. It's too big for her, but it's in one of her clothing bins anyway, and sometimes she'll pull it out. It has a bobble on top that seems to fascinate her. So she plays with it, and usually when she does I say something like, "Oh, there's your hat!"
Today she tried to put it on. And failed miserably, of course, because her dexterity is not the best and because squeezing your head into a knit stocking cap can be tricky. But here's the thing: she knew that it was supposed to go on her head, and she knew approximately how it worked - either because I've called it a hat before, or because she recognized that it was a hat.[1] Either way, that's pretty cool.
The thing about all three of these feats is that they are utterly trivial. They represent such elementary understandings that they barely seem like understandings at all. And yet, watching these achievements emerge in Alex, I'm also aware of how complex they are. To desire to wear socks, first you need to recognize the purpose of that tube of fabric lying on the floor. Then you need to understand, on some level, that wearing the sock will result in a warmer foot. (Before this, she's always seemed to regard socks as mere toys.) Then, assuming that you can't put the sock on yourself, you need to communicate your desire to someone else. Just handing me the sock wasn't enough - she hands me things all the time these days, and usually I say "thank you!" and either hand them back or put them down. She had to find a way to let me know what she wanted me to do with it. It's an astonishing chain of reasoning.
[1] She's quite good at recognizing what a hat is not. Or, at least, that's what I conclude from her mad cackling laughter when I put a cup on my head, or a book, or a rubber duck.
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Date: 2006-02-14 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 05:12 am (UTC)-J
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Date: 2006-02-14 03:06 pm (UTC)For the first time, I feel motivated to try teaching her some signs. Before, I knew theoretically that it was a good idea to sign with your baby, but it never seemed worth the trouble. Now it's obvious that she has stuff to say. So I've come up with six or seven words I think would be useful to her (mama, papa, eat, bottle, read, doggy, go outside), and I'm starting to incorporate them into our conversations.
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Date: 2006-02-14 04:22 pm (UTC)Watching a beloved child go from 'adorable larva' to 'small person capable of interacting with the world around her' is so miraculous. And you're a marvelous reporter. Thanks for sharing your stories.
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Date: 2006-02-14 07:03 pm (UTC)reasoning!
Date: 2006-02-14 05:35 am (UTC)#1 cause and effect.
#2 object permanance.
#3 i'm not sure of the child dev term, but still pretty darned cool.
yay and awww at the same time
Re: reasoning!
Date: 2006-02-14 02:53 pm (UTC)Her expression and laughter suggest that she expected me to be surprised. And that in turn suggests that she's developing the first glimmerings of a theory of mind - that is, the ability to figure out what other people's mental contents are likely to be.
I'd call #3 concept formation, but that's kind of a vague term.
Re: reasoning!
Date: 2006-02-18 05:25 pm (UTC)(I've been reading your journal for a while but don't think I've ever commented. I was so overwhelmed by taking care of my own three kids that I rarely wrote anything down about their antics or development; reading about Alex triggers waves of memories of things forgotten but I'm oh so happy to be reminded of them.
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Date: 2006-02-14 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 05:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 06:11 am (UTC)Our latest: I say "I'm gonna get you!" and she will cackle madly and go running off to the couch or the bed (whichever is in her line of sight - they are better for collapsing upon than hard tables or chairs), and then turn to look at me and make sure I'm chasing. I often chase in a crawling position, because it gives her a bit of a head start.
Elena still thinks socks are excellent toys - fortunately, moving south means I'm no longer worried about cold toes.
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Date: 2006-02-14 02:47 pm (UTC)The cutest example of this was the time that, as soon as I said "Heeeeeeere comes Mama!", she leaned back against my thigh and ducked her head down, shrieking with laughter. Good concealment skills, there, sweetie.
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Date: 2006-02-14 07:33 am (UTC)It's such fun watching them at this age, there's an almost constant ping noise as they put together how the world works. And the way their little faces light up when you Get It is fun too.
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Date: 2006-02-14 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 12:13 pm (UTC)Speaking as an AI/robotics researcher? They most certainly are not! The things we tend to think of as trivial - even, say, understand what we're seeing - are usually the absolute hardest to implement.
And when we do finally get something working, it's brittle as all get-out. We could probably build a robot that could reason about socks, or hats (and we've actually done a basic hide-n-seek robot here at NRL, inspired by one of the researcher's children), but all of them? Plus face and voice recognition, robust object manipulation... Heck no. There is no robot as sophisticated as Alex.
Human beings rock.
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Date: 2006-02-14 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 02:09 pm (UTC)Oh, and by the way, Old Navy socks stay on really well. You might want to try them. :)
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Date: 2006-02-14 02:26 pm (UTC)Thank you.
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Date: 2006-02-14 09:17 pm (UTC)If not: you know the way that at some age, kids magically recognise what a dog is. HOW do they do this? You look at different types of dogs - the labrador (which is the stereotype/default for "dog" in my head), a Scottie dog (Highland Terrier), a Great Dane, a husky, a greyhound, a German Shepherd, a chihuahua (sp?)... they look like completely different animals, some of them. And yet, a child aged about 3 or 4 can recognise that all of them are dogs, while all the different kinds of domestic cat are cats. They're not just going on the four legs + tail + WOOF or MEOW, because they can identify the difference in pictures without hearing the sound. So how do they do it? I want to know!
Like the artificial intelligence person who commented, some of these fundamental things that we're able to do that seem terribly simple concepts actually aren't at all, and it's amazing at what a young age kids start showing that they are intelligent beings.
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Date: 2006-02-15 12:00 am (UTC)It turns out that instead of having a mental checklist of required features, for most common objects we mentally compare them to a prototype. The closer something is to your prototype object, the quicker and more certain you are about labeling it as $object. So if your prototype dog is a Labrador, you might take miliseconds longer to agree that, say, a chihuahua is a dog. Or a Mexican hairless. Or a pulli.
Tiny kids don't have their prototypes very well refined yet. In a year or so, Alex is likely to refer to all medium-sized animals as "doggy." But you're right, they do learn - and quicker than it makes any sense that they should.
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Date: 2006-02-15 12:21 am (UTC)Lovely to read about Alex.
cheers
Emma
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Date: 2006-02-15 03:55 pm (UTC)Piaget wrote a lot about this process. He said that toddlers and preschoolers start out by trying to slot new things into their existing mental concepts, which he called "assimilation." Then, gradually, they start redefining their mental categories to better fit the new information they've encountered, which Piaget called "accommodation." So they move forward by constant refinement and reshuffling. Isn't it fun to watch it work?
Young, old, everything in between
Date: 2006-02-18 10:21 pm (UTC)cheers
Emma
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Date: 2006-02-15 06:37 pm (UTC)K.
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Date: 2006-02-15 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-17 02:42 am (UTC)