In this chapter it is outlined how the elements of cognition (see chapter on ‘contrast’) are brought together in a way that makes (a) sense(ful cognitive/attention system in the human). This happens to a main part in childhood but remains flexible over lifespan. There are general principles of perception that will do a reasonable establishment of concepts/associations, and emotional/bonding principles to to weight and bind, making/according attention. One general perception principle is called here covariation. It happens alone or by the media of a guiding bonder (pointing to things as part of covariation). Bonding body contact has an central role to base, guide and bind cognition (explication in chapter on emotion).
How can it be that there be built a organized senseful system of associated contrasts binging up our complex concepts system? It is all beginning in our childhood since the day of birth or even before (see also chapter on consciousness/emotion).
The bonder (mother, father, or other ‘significant’ person) and the child go to a park. The bonder says 'dog', pointing towards a dog, the child hearing and seeing the bonder doing it, and at the same time seeing the dog: a moving whole of ‘lines’ in a relatively constant environment. Also connected with sounds if the dog is barking.
Next time they go to another park and see another dog. Over these multiple yet similar experiences the child learns through co-variation the concept of dog. A dog can look differently but they mostly have a certain form, they bark and have a size within a certain range. Of course the child also learns the concept of park. A park has mostly trees, sometimes a lake or a river, grass, people playing, walking, and the like. Entities that are grasped through differentiated sensual experiences (feeling water, seeing ‘green’ grass, climbing a tree, walking around these, touching..). Adults already know all these aspects of a park. What they learned in childhood is the establishment of their own concept system, or, consciousness! A concept is created by associating co-varying sensual contrasts paralleling the growth of synapses and brain associations.
One could imagine for example that the child not only learns what a dog looks like and that it is called a 'dog'. It will also learn what tactile characteristics a dog has and what it can smell like. Through an 'uncountable' number of moments and perceptions a child builds its concepts associating experiential co-varying stimuli of all (different) senses (contrast!)! All our concepts are fuzzily intertwined as we meet them in our surroundings, and weighted by emotion (bonder, see chapter on emotion)! And there is no such as a single concept - all of our concepts are relative by (more and less) contrasting each other, defining one the other (white versus red - (re)visit the chapter on contrast)! The process of concept learning might begin on a very elementary basis as soon as the child starts to interact with the bonders just after birth or even earlier. Concept formation is going along with the differentiation of the nervous system. And so the concept system of any person is unique because of differences in the number and quality of specific experiences made.
The 'media' for concept formation is given by evolutionary basic equipment and close persons - persons that already have a rather stable core of concept system. (What is described here as weighting by bonding interactions concerns the building of an internal working model as described by Bowlby in attachment theory - see also chapter 'emotion').
One psychologist that already dealt with covariation or covariance was Kelley.
The next chapter will deal on how the association of different sensual elements is organized physiologically. How does the brain come to bind sensory entities of different kind together?