The Development of Concepts

The Development of Concepts. • • • • • • • • We have examined some of the neural processes that are involved in the development of concepts (abstraction, imagery and generalization). But the development of a concept is a dynamic process that begins at a point in time and then keeps growing and changing with maturation and experience. We will now be looking at how the concepts grow and change with time. One of the descriptions of this process that I find most meaningful has been provided by Newell Kephart in his book Learning Disabilities. Kephart dichotomizes the modalities into two types: Distal and Proximal. The Proximal Modalities are those whose transducers come into physical contact with their referents. The Tactile, Kinesthetic and probably Gustatory (taste) modalities are good examples. On the other hand, few of us would think of touching something with our eyeballs. The Distil Modality, then includes those transducers that do not come into contact with the referent. The visual, auditory and olfactory senses are good examples. Kephart describes a concept as developing through seven stages. The first stage starts at birth, but we can go through these stages again and again later on in life, as new concepts are acquired. I don't actually recall Kephart sayaing that in particular, but it has been my observation and experience. • • • The names of the stages sound a little like gobbledeegook, but they make a lot of sense when examined closely. The seven stages are: 1. MOTOR 2. THE MOTOR-PERCEPTUAL 3. PERCEPTUAL-MOTOR 4. PERCEPTUAL 5. PERCEPTUAL-CONCEPTUAL 6. CONCEPTUAL 7. CONCEPTUAL-PERCEPTUAL Let's look at each one individually. 1. Motor: In the Motor Stage, the level of neural development, at least for the baby, is a system of basic reflexes. o The child's center of attention (using the term loosely) is inward bound. Piaget refers to this as a time of "autistic thought." o Indeed, the child is responding to internal feelings mostly, of hunger, discomfort, a need to be touched, and a little later, boredom. o The major task for babies in the Motor Stage is to learn abaut themselves. They need to gain an awareness of the parts of their body--their arms, hands, fingers, legs, lips, jaw etc., etc. o This is originally completely a Haptic matter. As the child moves around reflexively, feedback begins to build a neural map of their body in the brain. o There is, to be sure, stimulation in the other modalities; and we have stressed the importance of providing stimulation to all modalities to facilitate development of the neural infra-structure for each. But this information is un-integrated. In terms of basic knowledge about the self--the Haptic modality takes the lead. o Adults experience the Motor Stage anew when they take up a new musical instrument or physical activity. o Take Ballet, for example. An adult beginning this course of study discovers muscles and actions that are entirely new, and body positions that seem totally foreign. o Later, one acquires aches in muscles they never new existed. o For the baby one of many important areas for discovery is the vocal mechanism. The action here is originally totally reflexive. Cooing and Crying are instinctive, and every normal child can do these. Through use and maturation, however, more elaborate movements and sounds become possible, although they are still pretty much reflexive in nature. o But it is a beginning for the learning process that leads to an awareness of the tongue, the velum, the jaw and the larynx and what they can do. 2. Motor-Perceptual: The motor-perceptual stage does not wait for the Motor stage to be completely finished before it begins. o Indeed, we pass through the Motor stage repeatedly as we start to learn many new concepts. o Weeks after birth the child‰s attention is beginning to shift towards examining what is out there--in the world. o The significance of the word ‹MotorŠ in the name of the stage is that the major modalities for exploring the environment are theTactile, Kinesthetic and gustatory Modalities. o • o o o o o o o These are proximal modalities, which means that the child must come into contact with objects in the environment to understand them. That means they must touch things with their hands, feet, lips, tongue and just about any other part of their body. From these contacts they gain an a knowledge of texture; shape, size, weight, and a sense of space. If ever there was a baby college, this is it. If you watch a baby crawling on the floor they are constantly probing with fingers and toes and mouth and anything else they can bring into contact with an object, which can be the rug, table legs or toys like blocks, balls, and dolls etc. Their activity may look like aimless fidgeting to an adult, but to the contrary, it is intense exploration of the world. The word "Perceptual" in the MotorPerceptual name also has important implications. It is a reminder that while the child is exploring the environment with the proximal modalities, he/she is also cross referencing the input with that from the distil modalities. This would begin in earnest after three months when neural associations between modalities have been established. Below an instance of the activity of FEELING/SEEING TEXTURE o o o o Children use their jaws, fingers, and arms as calipers to judge size and then relates this information to the visual modality. Below is an instance of arms being used as calipers to evaluate a SMALL DIAMETER and a LARGE DIAMETER An understanding of space is obtained by measuring it against the length of the arms or the angle of the jaws. Below is an instance of a child using body parts as calipers to measure A NARROW BAR and A WIDE SEAT. The more encounters the child has , the more knowledge she/he gains and the more brain tissue he/she generates. But then, who wants a kid smarter then his/her parents? o The more objects the child can explore, the more opportunity she has to develop the neural infrastructure to process and associate input from more than one modality. This is an early in life opportunity but someone must be willing to be there to provide the stimuli, the intensity and the safety! Typically, only parents and enlightened extended family are motivated enough to do this. Below are illustrations of some close encounters of a terrestrial kind. o o o • In terms of the vocal mechanism, the child is entering a stage called Babbling. This is a time of exploration of combinations of sounds which a baby can make. It is motor driven (reflexive); but it is perceived and correlated through the auditory modality (motor-perceptual) Babbling, as we mentioned is an activity which is generated through genetic inheritance and is evidenced only in humans. Below is an instance of the process of examining and evaluating a A TEDDY BEAR's SOFTNESS. 3. Perceptual Motor: In the perceptual motor stage a "change of gears" has occurred. Instead of exploring the environment by contact, the child can now use the distil modality to examine the world. Visual (or Auditory) input is then interpreted with the associated motor experience. This is how vision derives its full meaning. o o Below is an illustration of the use of the feet for EXPLORING the environment (the MotorPerceptual level of exploration. Notice how much more laborious this is than simple looking at the object (Perceptual-Motor). To experience the difference between the motorperceptual and perceptual motor stage, download the image of the star (below) and then print it out. If you don't have a printer then use your cursor to trace the star on the monitor for the two tasks that follow. o o o o o The first task is to take a colored pencil and trace the star between the line. Not a difficult job to do for an adult or child who is at or beyond the perceptual-motor stage. The second task. Get a small hand mirror and place it so that you can see the star in the mirror.  Then watching the star in the mirror, re-trace the star between the lines with a different colored pencil (or with your cursor again, if you don‰t have a printer).  This is how it feels to be at the motorperceptual stage. The difference is this. At the perceptual-motor stage, the input from the eyes (distil) can direct the hand (motor). But when you use the mirror image, the distil input doesn‰t correlate any more and you must resort to attending not to what you see but to what you feel kinisthetically. In other words, the motor (proximal) is the major focus of attention (motor-perceptual). o o o o o o o o • Below is an instance of a child of USING THE FINGERS TO EXAMINE COMPLEX CONTOURS (a Motor-Perceptual task, not unlike what a blind person does to explore the world) Below is an illustration of an examination of BUBBLES which ARE typically found to be LIGHT AND FRAGIL. In terms of the vocal mechanism, from about 6 months on, the child is in a vocal stage, we will describe later as exhibiting lalling and jargon. The sounds that the child is making are no longer simply the result of hit-or-miss attempts (motorperceptual) but are purposefully orchestrated. That means an auditory image from the Mixer is dictating what the motor pattern (sound) will be--a perceptual-motor process. Below is an instance of a child an evaluating of a A VACUUM TUBE which IS typically NARROW, moderately LIGHT and SMOOTH and FUN. Another important process is occurring at that time. The child is tackling the problem of why different objects are given the same name. At this point, the word ‹shoeŠ may refer to just a particular shoe. This is a concrete level of meaning. But this is not how the adults use the term. They use if for many types of shoes. What do they all have in common? Below is an instance of a concrete concept of A SHOE which BY ANY OTHER NAME IS SOMETHING ELSE. 4. Perceptual: When the child has solved the problem, as we discussed in the last section, we have reached the Perceptual Stage. o o o o o o Now the world, as he/she can encounter it is divided up into categories, with symbols to represent them--shoes, dogs, boats and so forth. I like to call these palpable categories ‹percepts.Š Below is an instance of an evaluation (motorperceptual) of a STATUE which IS LARGE, HARD, HEAVY AND ROUGH. Considerable time is spent in the early elementary grades in developing the child's inventory of percepts. In terms of the vocal mechanism, the child has acquired auditory percepts. We have called them phonemes and they are categories of sounds which make up the units of the language the child is learning, and the speech sounds she will hear. Below is an instance of an examination of WET SAND which is ROUGH and GRITTY. You may be wondering why there are so many illutrations of motor-perceptual activities. The answer is that there are many opportunities that the child can and should have to explore the invironment at this age. This is the name of the game and the payoff is big-information which the child needs to gain concepts is obtained, and still more brain tissue is added to the central nervous system. Not everybody gets these experiences. I have come across children in Hawaii, who have never been to the beach, and children in downtown LosAngeles (inner city) who have never been to a super-market! • 5. Perceptual-Conceptual: In a sense, the spiral of events begin to occur again but on a higher level. o The child notices, or is taught that a horse, a car, a train, a boat and a plane (all of which are categories or percepts) have something in common. This process of abstracting and comparing the bonds of categories is what the perceptualconceptual stage o Below are instances of an examination of a door jam where the THE WALL IS RIGID, and also the discovery that GRASS WILL BEND AND BREAKeasily (motorperceptual experience). 6. Conceptual: When the child has solved this problem we have the bases for a new higher level category. In the case of the car and plane etc., it is called transportation. o o o The amazing thing about these higher level categories is that unlike the percept where you can point to a member of the group, it is not so easy to do this with the concepts. Take for example the concept of Democracy. What is there to point to? Some concept can be demonstrated motorically, usually with considerable effort. In actuality, concepts are accessed most readily by their symbol. This is where language becomes the bridge to a new Universe! At the percept level, for example, we see stars as little pin points of light, some blue, some red and some white. At the concept level we see, as I mentioned before, other solar systems with other o suns and worlds shrouded in a wind of deadly particles. Without language this knowledge would all be denied to us. With language (and its associated concepts) we can see to the edge of space and time; know the history of the world and the Universe and foresee the future for billions of years to come; and maybe learn how to extend life in terms of centuries rather than decades. 7. Concept-Perceptual: So what is left to discuss? Perhaps the most important stage of all. It‰s like the puppy who wags his tail. o o o o o The puppy is the percept and the tail in the concept. In time, however, the tail becomes so immense that the tail wags the dog. We need the percept to develop the concept. But once we have the concept it becomes a powerful screen (like a pair of binoculars, a microscope, and an Xray machine combined) through which we see the world. We no longer see the world as children but decode every experience in the light of what we already know about it. The child sees an ice cream cone and eats it and enjoys it. I see it, eat it, and feel pangs of guilt and remorse because I know it is adding to the store of fat cells I keep promising to shed, etc. Here in lies the importance of higher eduction, particularly general education. It is our nature that we will develop concepts and they will effect how we see the world. Hence, it becomes critical that we help each person to acquire the most complete and finely developed system of concepts possible. This is the goal of • higher education, and particularly General Education. o The more concepts we have about the world, the more in depth we will see the world. After you have been to college and meet someone who never got through high school, (or majored in Tropical Agriculture) you will sense a gap in your conversation with that person. o Typically, (unless they are self taught and avid readers) they will see world issues in dichotomous degrees of black or white. o College graduates, however, will see world issues in many shades of gray due to their penetrating perceptual screens. o HERE'S THE FINAL PITCH. Since concept development is such an integral part of language, and is a life long process, language development is a life-long process. But it doesn't just happen in a vacuum. Like the child who thrives on stimulation, adult language must also be contiuallyl exercised to grow. Those who read, and those who explore new domains and learn newe skills or perfect old ones even after retirement will experience language growth. o But now, back to the younger kids. We will now look at the process of Concept and Language development from the point of view of two famous observers of child growth--Piaget and Vygotsky.