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The sensorimotor stage spans the first two years of life. Its name reflects Piaget's belief that infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities mentally. Yet the advances of the sensorimotor stage are so vast that Piaget divided it into six substages, summarized in Table 6.1. Piaget based this sequence on a very small sample: his own three children. He observed his son and two daughters carefully and presented them with everyday problems (such as hidden objects) that helped reveal their understanding of the world."
Berk, Laura E. (2012-05-02). Child Development (Page 228). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
The Sensorimotor Stage
This the earliest in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. He described this period as a time of tremendous growth and change.
During this initial phase of development, children experience the world and gain knowledge through their senses and motor movements. As children interact with their environments, they go through an astonishing amount of cognitive growth in a relatively short period of time.
The first stage of Piaget's theory lasts from birth to approximately age two and is centered on the infant trying to make sense of the world.
During the sensorimotor stage, an infant's knowledge of the world is limited to his or her sensory perceptions and motor activities. Behaviors are limited to simple motor responses caused by sensory stimuli.
Children utilize skills and abilities they were born with (such as looking, sucking, grasping, and listening) to learn more about the environment.
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identify major features of this stage, including intentional/means-end behavior, circular reactions, and the development of object permanence:
Intentional/meansend behavior- intentional, or goal-directed, behavior, coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple problems. The clearest example comes from Piaget's famous object-hiding task, in which he shows the baby an attractive toy and then hides it behind his hand or under a cover. Infants in this substage can find the object by coordinating two schemes— "pushing" aside the obstacle and "grasping" the toy. Piaget regarded these means-end action sequences as the foundation for all problem solving.
Circular Reaction:
Provides a special means of adapting their first schemes. Involves stumbling
onto a new experience caused by the baby's own motor activity. As the infant tries to repeat the event again one again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance is strengthened into a new scheme.
Development of object permanence:
Retrieving hidden objects is evidence that infants have begun to master object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight. But this awareness is not yet complete. Babies still make the A-not-B
search error: If they reach several times for an object at one hiding place (A), then see it moved to another (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A). Piaget concluded that the babies do not yet have a clear image of the object as persisting when hidden from view.