Once a while back at a restaurant I happened to catch this child eating french fries. But she was engrossed in something else besides eating. I was interested in her intensity as she studied the french fries in frame 1. She has two and both have ketchup but something interests her. In frame 2 she dips one that already has ketchup on it into the ketchup and then seems to be comparing the two in frame 3 but it is more than comparison. The close up in frame 4 suggests she is attempting to transfer ketchup from one to the other. Why?
She could, and later does, add ketchup by dipping the french fry once again but it is not adding ketchup than seems of interest; she seems intent on the transfer process itself. In frame 5 she continues they attempt to transfer. What is she trying to understand?
Obviously she is about to eat the french fry but clearly even though she is eating, it is the process of ketchup transfer that seems to fascinate her. Is is trivial to we adults but there is more to transfer than is obvious. Every transfer or transformation from one state to another produces a new observable property. The transfer of ketchup to the french fry produces an obvious change in the french fry to the child but not so with all dipping. Putting hands in water produces very little observable change, at least in color. But with the french fries there is a marked change in appearance. Now how can that transformation in the objects be understood?
Many times the child has dipped her hands in water and transferred the water to a towel effectively undoing the wetting caused by dipping. Here it may be the use of the same schema, the wiping of the french fry to undo the ketchuping. We don't know what the amorphous intent of the child might be. Doing and undoing some change is a fundamental process in developing an understanding of the world, and it seems to be the case here. If she can markedly change the appearance of the french fry by dipping it in ketchup, how can she undo this change. How can she do the same thing in the opposite direction—from dipping and changing the french into one with a red glob on the end, then back again to one without a red glob?
There is another clue. When children try to think about transformations and they cannot yet effect the action in thought, this lack of representation develops by abstraction from the physical, sensory-motor activity. It is the coordinations of behavioral activity that come to be reconstructed on the higher plane as mental activity and therefore representation. The object cannot be represented in its absence without a cognitive mechanism that can reconstruct the absent object and its transformations in the mind's eye.
The clue lies in the child's mouth. Often when children attempt to put challenging things together or take them apart (and actually we even find adults making facial contortions in difficult tasks), they reflect the transformations with facial gestures. The opening of her mouth could be the reflection of the physical nature of the task. It might appear to be an anticipatory action before eating the french fry but she is not yet going to eat it. She finds she cannot transfer the ketchup from one french fry to the other in frame 5 (all photos didn't upload), and so after having completed the transfer experiment, in the last frame she dips each french fry once again and eats each.
I want to make a point by this perhaps tedious analysis of a simple act of eating french fries, and it goes beyond the simplistic platitude that digesting cognitive aliment is as important to children as the biological digestion of the physical aliment. It is about the relationship between parenting and the development of intelligence. Imagine how different parents might react to this child's activity. One might say, "Don't play with your food. Finish eating and then you can go play." Another might say, "Are you running out of ketchup? Here, I'll give you some more." Others might say nothing but fleetingly think about how cute that is for the child to dip her french fries so carefully in ketchup. Extremely rarely would a parent see in the child's activity a careful process of investigation and the construction and refinement of schemas of transfer and change objects physical objects.
