Cognitive Learning

If you're rusty on your English, cognitive learning is the rawest form of taking information - seeing something, reading it, smelling it, whatever, processing the information and responding with an action for a desired result. Observation A = Action B = Desired Result C. It's what makes dogs and chimps seem human. Responding to voice commands and such. Basic human learning - see something, repeat it. For babies it's different because at some point you just see the twinkle in their eye that ... they get it. They're not a helpless infant that only knows how to breathe, eat, do bathroom stuff, stare aimlessly and mindlessly manipulate simple toys. Then, you see the mind evolve and know it's ready to take the next step. You do something to a toy, it makes a noise when you do something to it, and then you get the contemplative stare of: How did that happen? Did I do that?
Kole up to now has been doing some basic mockery - waving and clapping hands. He has toys, like donut-looking things on a stand, and he has figured out that he can pull off the donuts. The basic monkey stuff. But in the last week or two we've seen the product of what I think is cognitive reasoning. He has a baseball toy where if you move the tee the ball sits on it plays music. Before he would swat the tee because he knew it would move. Now we believe he puposely moves the tee to make it play the music. Then came last night. Riley & Reagan (or Kelley, actually) gave Kole a little play set that includes a little car with a ramp. It's barely a foot tall and the car goes down this slide in about 1 second. Nothing elaborate. But Kole loves watching it. Put the car on this top little landing, push it, the car goes down the slide - and sometimes you can make something else fall down when the car goes through it. Kole can watch this over and over until he gets the urge to grab the car then taste it, throw it away then go find Maggie. But last night something clicked in his brain. There had been Observation A for a while, and now he was ready to make an Action B for a Desired Result C. As Kathy was cleaning up after dinner and I was playing on the floor with him (I do more than my share around the house, I promise, but if I don't get home until after 5:00 I have very little time with him until his 8:00 bed time. So - I was getting my daddy time in!) I was playing with the little car thing. After letting the car down the ramp, Kole did something that is essentially simple, but was neat to watch. He grabbed the car and attempted to place it back at the top of the slide. I barked at Kathy and made her watch, and she had the same wide-eyed look of amazement that I did. I took a picutre! It was like .... He gets it! He wants to do it again! So over and over we went. Letting the car down the slide, then letting Kole ungracefully slap the car back up top. After a few minutes, it became throwing the car. Then we would put the car up top and see if he could gently push it, which he responded by either grabbing it back or tackling the whole race track. Then it was time to go casually crawl away, grab some donuts and slap them together and give a gleeful screetch. A brief moment, but we think a real milestone of cognitive learning. Maybe it's one of those things that only another parent can relate to, and I hate thinking about stooping to parental snobbery in relation to the non-parents out there, but this was very exciting for us to see.