My wonderful little niece

I love my niece. I got to visit my family last weekend and I played with my three-year old niece. She is absolutely adorable. We were putting together a puzzle that was probably a little too advanced for her. So I began to analyze her behavior as she and I put the puzzle back together. It actually turned out to be wonderful fodder for my human development class the following Tuesday. We spent some time discussing how different theorists would have explained her behavior.

Interestingly, she would focus on one side of a puzzle piece and not integrate the rest of the sides to help herself orient the puzzle piece in order to fit it to the puzzle. She also was not integrating the second dimension of color.

Piaget would have suggested she was centrating on one aspect of the puzzle. Werner would have suggested she had differentiated the pieces, but not hierarchically integrated them. Pascual Leone would have suggested that she did not have enough M-capacity to hold all the different aspects of the task in working memory at once. Also, she was dealing with an affective component of the task because it was a Casper the Ghost puzzle and she was afraid of the large ghost eyes. She regulated herself by using self-talk, "This isn't a real ghost. It's okay. It's not real." The affective component would have drawn some working memory, thereby taking away from the available working memory for the task. Finally, Robbie Case would have suggested that she was operating at a unidimensional level and had not integrated the two to three dimensions required for optimal performance. Jeez! I love this kind of stuff!