

Piaget believed that the events of this stage were so dramatic that he actually divided the sensorimotor stage further into six distinct substages.ġ. Sights, sounds, movements, tastes, smells, and textures all provide valuable information that help infants discover the world. The truth is that babies are able to acquire a tremendous amount of information just by utilizing their sensory systems and motor skills. Looking at a very young child, you might question just how much they really are able to generate knowledge from their actions. Infants are limited in terms of their ability to independently explore, so every interaction they have with people and the environment serves as an important learning opportunity.īabies and toddler rely on the basic abilities they were born with, such as rooting, sucking, chewing, and looking, to learn more about themselves, the people around them, and the environment they live in. The earliest foundations of language development are established during this stage as well.ĭuring the sensorimotor stage, infants learn about the world around them through their senses, perceptions, and motor skills. The physical milestones of this stage also contribute to cognitive development, as children explore the world through reaching, grasping, rolling, crawling, and eventually walking. One of the critical events of the sensorimotor stage is the development of object permanence, or the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. A remarkable amount of learning takes place during this relatively brief period. Each stage is marked by changes in how kids think about and relate to the people and object in their environment.ĭuring the first two years of life, a child’s knowledge of the world stems from motor actions and sensory information. Piaget proposed that children progress through four distinct stages of intellectual development. The stages of mental development that children go through as they obtain and create knowledge.The ways that this knowledge is acquired or altered (assimilation, equilibration, and accommodation).Schemas, or the mental frameworks that make up knowledge.Piaget’s theory focused on three critical components: His observations of his young nephew and later his own children added to his growing theory of childhood cognitive development. Upon questioning kids about their answers, he realized that how they responded depended upon their level of intellectual development. Charged with interpreting the results on the standardized intelligence tests that Binet had developed for the French government, Piaget was interested in why children answered questions incorrectly. It was his work in Alfred Binet’s laboratory in Paris that Piaget developed an interest in children’s cognitive development. It was after spending a semester studying with Carl Jung that Piaget developed a stronger interest in psychology. He published his first scientific paper on the subject of mollusks when he was just 11 years old.

Born in the late 1800s, Piaget was a child prodigy. Piaget’s fascination with science began early in life, with his initial interests lying with the natural sciences. As development progresses, children’s intellectual abilities become increasingly sophisticated, eventually allowing kids to think and reason about abstract concepts and problems. During the earliest stages of development, children learn about the world primarily through their senses.

The theory he developed describes four different stages of cognitive development that children go through as they learn more about the world.
