The (Puzzling) Force of Habit
Charlie has started to learn how to use the mouse on the computer to do some online jigsaw puzzles and an interesting conundrum has developed. When he has 5 pieces in place for a 6 piece puzzle, or 11 in place for a 12 piece puzzle, he tries to move the block of 5 or 11 pieces, rather than maneuver the remaining one piece into place. It is a motor-planning issue: I can see that he is not accurately judging how much “space” there is to move the piece. But it is also the force of habit: When Charlie does a puzzle, after he has a big enough mass of put-together puzzle pieces, he takes random small pieces and tries to fit them in, regardless of whether their colors match the pattern of the puzzle picture. He is focusing on the big mass of puzzle pieces, I think, rather than the small ones, in his puzzle strategy, and this gives me a clue about how Charlie sees things, or only sees parts of things.
For more mouse practice, we are trying out these websites: pass the ball and ladybug mouse.
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POSTED IN: Charlisms, Technology
6 opinions for The (Puzzling) Force of Habit
Leila
May 2, 2007 at 10:19 am
Wow, cool sites. Although my phobia of insects is so intense that even ladybugs make me cringe a little.
Laura Cottington
May 2, 2007 at 1:02 pm
This is exactly what I have been looking for Sam!!! Thank you. His brother mastered that mouse at 2, and Sam wants to try some of the educational programs I have, but is always soooooooo frustrated. School has even made modifications for him to use the computer other than the mouse. Super cool. I can’t wait till he gets home from school to try it!
Kristina Chew, PhD
May 2, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I’ve bookmarked the sights for Charlie—-yes, it is one intensely big ladybug.
Moi ;)
May 3, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Is it me, or is that Pass the Ball creepy? LOL
Kristina Chew, PhD
May 4, 2007 at 12:04 am
So they’re both creepy in their own ways……
Phil Schwarz
May 4, 2007 at 2:16 am
Re. force of habit: I think there’s a potent reason for it, in the type of context you illustrate with Charlie’s approach to puzzle solving. It has to do with what I’ve started to call “parsimony of bandwidth”.
I think that many of us on the spectrum have limited bandwidth for various kinds of cognitive processing. (Bandwidth is the amount of input that can be processed in a given time.) For some of us, it’s processing concurrent sensory input. For some of us, it’s processing new ideas, or processing the learning of new techniques, while concurrently having to allocate part of our mental attention to other things. And for some of us, it’s undertaking the often greater-than-typical effort to produce language, particularly verbal language, and concurrently handle sensory and social inputs.
So what do we do, to manage our bandwidth in contexts where it is a scarce resource? One thing we do, is to reduce as much of what we can to “precompiled”, automatically-played-back, or “autopilot”, routines — in order to free up cognitive capacity for other impinging concurrent inputs, which may have greater urgency.
This is such a successful and necessary kind of adaptation that sometimes it gets overapplied. We wind up — often reflexively — loading and running the precompiled, prerecorded routine, in contexts where we should be proceeding more dynamically, adaptively, interactively.
An old joke that’s a humorous aside about precompiled/pre-recorded routines:
A physics professor and a math professor, both chain smokers, had adjacent offices on campus.
One day the physicist accidentally threw a still smoldering butt into his trash can, which ignited some papers. The physicist jumped up, got the fire extinguisher from the hall, and doused the flames in the trash can.
The mathematician had come out of his office to see what the ruckus was all about, and observed all this.
As luck would have it, some weeks later, the mathematician accidentally threw a still smoldering but into *his* trash can, and it ignited some papers.
What did the mathematician do? He picked up the trash can with the burning papers in it, brought it over to the door of the physicist’s office, and walked back to his own office declaring that the remainder of what was necessary to do was an already-solved problem…
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