Today I tried to do a puzzle with Alberta. I introduced her to the time-honored method of starting with the edge and corner pieces. The puzzle we were working on has this nice red border that makes looking for edge pieces even easier.
But she just wouldn’t do it. Alberta doesn’t think in terms of abstract concepts like edges and corners. She prefers to think in more concrete terms, like unicorns and elephants. No matter how many times I suggested it, she ignored my promptings to look for edge pieces and continued her search for her favorite animals. She is pretty good at pattern matching, so her method worked just fine. Her way of thinking is fundamentally different than mine but it got the job done.
Here is how it looked halfway through:
Notice that almost all of the unconnected pieces are edges. Not a single corner piece is connected. I think this is due to the fact that the corner pieces have abstract, colored balls instead of animals. Also, Alberta likes to find an animal based on its neighbors and the edge pieces have fewer such relationships, so they are less likely to be chosen next.
Maybe her way of thinking will evolve over time. Recently Mercedes and I were looking into various theories of psychological development in connection with one of her graduate school assignments. One of the theorists, Jean Piaget, argued that children go through developmental stages, and that they don’t reach the “concrete-operational” stage (where manipulation of symbols becomes more natural) until somewhere around age 7.
Another theorist, Lev Vygotsky, interviewed a bunch of villagers and found that uneducated adults didn’t really think in the same logical patterns that more educated people did. His theory of cultural-historical psychology postulates that our psychological development depends heavily on our social environment.
“Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the high functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”
Vygotsky believed that social relationships, not individuals, are the fundamental ‘unit’ of psychology. To a large extent, I agree. At an early age I felt powerful in the world of ideas, and to a certain extent this is probably because of the positive feedback I got from succeeding at intellectual tasks. I became invested in cognitive-emotional strategies where I felt like I had an edge (no pun intended).
Most children are probably more interested in animals than in edges. I realized by about 3rd grade that math was a lot easier for me than for most of my neighbors. At the same time I started to develop anxiety about relating to other people.
There is probably a genetic component to this. My father had some similar experiences in school, although he ended up going into a relationship driven field (business school, then real estate). Despite a bit of meandering of my own (i.e., my stint in the Air Force, teaching junior high, etc.), I have pretty much gone all in on the “edges” strategy.
It is early, but as she demonstrated with this puzzle, I suspect Alberta might double down on the “animal” strategy (i.e., her social environment). If so, I hope I can help her master that approach to the world. After I decided to stop pushing her into the “edges” approach, helping her solve the puzzle in her own way was much more satisfying for both of us.
