![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
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.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 12:21 am (UTC)Lovely to read about Alex.
cheers
Emma
no subject
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
no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 06:37 pm (UTC)K.