Cognitive Psychology
Summary 4 (week 6)
Elmo Recio
For this summary (number 4, week 6) I hopped on the web to attempt to select a document of interest to me. Much to my dismay, there were not many which exhibited the “newspaper” / “magazine” length. So I selected a set of notes from a lecture on “The Emergence of Representational Intelligence.” [http://fnord.dur.ac.uk/teaching/1ChildDev/h4_details.html#Rep]. The subsection that I selected was one on the cognitive context of representational intelligence: representation.
Basically this article is about the fact that language is one of the most powerful cognitive tools that we have. It allows us to make use of our cognition by being able to represent it. The article states that it is around the second year of life that we are begin to “think” in the way the we understand thinking to be. It relates this to the fact that at that age we begin to manipulate the world around us for “playing.” It also goes on to state that several forms of play. One form of play would be the “sensory motor” and the “symbolic play.”
The first, sensory motor, involves a type of “overt” intelligence show. Where we react to the enviorns in solving basic problems. While we explore this field, it is quite apparent what we are doing. However, the second, symboic play, is when we begin to explore the world around us in a pretend way. We use external tools to represent things in our heads. A classic example, is a child playing with a doll, or toy car. Eventually this sort of pretence play evolves into a more complex “covert” action, which can only be represented by the verbal or written language (be it maths, literature, etc...) While we don’t lose the previous form of exploration, we aquire these new forms of “play” and they complement each other.
Looking back into my own childhood I can recall many times when I engaged in this sort of representational “pretense” play. Many times, I remember, being on my hands and knees playing with this car (which I had taken apart) so that it looked more like a bus. I would use the tiles on the floor to represent city blocks (being the city boy as I am). I would have a systematic way of representing these blocks versus “real life block” where two tiles would equal one city block and a tile between each of my blocks would represent an intersection. Looking back on it now, I realise that I was just a normal individual not actually “playing bus” but actually attempting to explore the world around me and learining to represent it. I never talked about this play. I never explained to my parents (represented the pretense play) by talking and speaking it out loud. However, they could figure out by the noises I was making and down to the sound effects of opening the door (“pssstfffff”) that I was “playing bus.”
As I grew older, I realised that there were more interesting ways to play this game. I could be the bus driver; with one of my mothers slippers overturned on the floor, I could represent the gas pedal. I never play anymore now. However, I do use the written representational world for pretense play. I read poems, and sing along to lyrics to represent the feeling conveyed therein in a covert manner. Things were easier back then! >8-\