Kid's Associative and Causal Learning, In Action

Its amazing how fast little kids can learn.

I had the fortunate chance of seeing my nephew (that's Squigly, for those who have tuned in since the start of my blogging days) perform the most amazing associative feat I've seen.

Imagine 14-month old kid, walking around oblivious to everything around him. All he does regularly is walk, point, dash quickly to your room when he sees the your door ajar, then proceed to systematically pull out all your neatly placed books, photoalbums... basically pull out any item that rests in anything that looks remotely like a shelf and under 4 feet in height, and dump everything on the floor. Then when everything is off the shelf, he promptly leaves.

Imagine the same kid, one day, entering your room, and again, starts pulling out the books. Then all of a sudden, he makes a quick detour and towards the stack of DVDs. Knowing that he'll eventually be pulling down everything, you pick a piece of DVD that's already in front of him, and hand it over to him willingly. Normally enough, he grabs the DVD, then for some strange reason, still handling the DVD, starts to walk out of your room, makes his small steps and crosses the short hall to the initial edge of the living room, stops for a heartbeat and looks at you.

You ask him, "Yes, baby, baby... what is it?".

He then gives you a huge smile, and continues his path to the center of the living room. He then again stops, looks at you, raises his very small pair of hands holding the DVD, and then points it at the general direction of the television set and DVD player.

OoooooOOooh. Smart kid. Even if the DVD came from my room, he was smart enough to recognize that the DVD in my room and associate its use to the same DVDs found outside the living room. Take note, its not a DVD with any distinctive features, like Barney or Blues Clues, or Sesame Street. Its just a plain, generic, writable DVD.

Amazed at the feat, I immediately proceeded to talk to him.

"Yes, that's right baby, the DVD is placed there so you can watch your cartoons. Smart boy."

Squigly then gives a big smile, and places the DVD on his hands to the living room table. He then curiously looks around, heads to an opposite direction, and grabs the gray remote control for the DVD player laying nearby!

This time I was really impressed. "Wow baby! that's right! do you want to watch cartoons right now? I'll help you with it, if you like. Give me the remote control and the DVD, I'll help you put it in."

But he doesn't seem to be listening at the moment. While I was still talking to him, he then heads off to the same living room table and rests the gray remote control on it. He then stands about again, looking left and right, as if searching for something.

By this time, my brother was already following the spectacular feat. He suddenly realized something, and grabbed the black remote control on top of the tv... which, likely for a kid, couldn't see it because it was "way up there". My brother then placed it at eye level a little way off, and then watched the events unfold:

And my brother was right; after standing about for a couple of seconds looking left and right, Squigly finally headed off to the direction of the black tv remote control and picked it up. He promptly pressed the button that turns on the tv, replaced it on top of the table and now picked up the gray remote control (for the DVD player) and the DVD disc.

Eventually, we had to ask him if he can give us the DVD disc (since we was having trouble opening the DVD player tray), sneakily replaced it with one of his usual discs, and placed it in. Squigly then immediately pressed the biggest button (the play button) on the DVD remote, and then the show starts.

Then he started grinning and smiling and beaming at us.

Needless to say, so did we.

Amazing kids.