Description
A child’s growth and development is affected by many more factors other than just, growth. Though age does greatly pertain to development, there are many more stages and phases that contribute to the way a child develops and filters the world around them. This week you dove deep into theorists who have assisted in creating an understanding of the foundation of child development. They helped to explain how child development unfolds, sources of vulnerability and protection that influences child development, and how the course of development may be altered by prevention and intervention efforts. Understanding how these theorists beliefs help to shape and mold our understanding helps educators integrate this knowledge into their work with children and their families to ensure they are supporting healthy developmental outcomes and creating trusting partnerships with caregivers.*This week your assignment is to reflect back on each theorists and how it contributes to the foundation of development. You are to write a two page reflective essay that describes how each correlate with you personally, and how has it shaped you in your growth from childhood to adolescence whether it be good or bad? Consider your childhood experiences and the environment in which you grew up as a child. How have those experiences influenced your teaching style?
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CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Principles & Perspectives
© 2005
Joan Littlefield Cook
Greg Cook
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s a m p l e
c h a p t e r
The pages of this Sample Chapter may have
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Cognitive Development
Piagetian and Sociocultural Views
CHAPTER PREVIEW
Piaget’s Constructivist View of Cognitive
Development
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural View of Cognitive
Development
• Piaget as a Child Prodigy
• Vygotsky’s Background: The Sociocultural
Context for a New Theory
• Constructivism and Interaction
with the Environment
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
• Stage 1: Sensorimotor Thought (Birth to 2 Years)
• Stage 2: Preoperational Thought (2 to 7 Years)
• The Role of Speech and Language
• Mediation: With a Little Help from Your Friends
• The Zone of Proximal Development
• Scaffolding: Support during Learning
• Stage 3: Concrete Operational Thought
(7 to 11 Years)
Recent Sociocultural Views of Cognitive
Development
• Stage 4: Formal Operational Thought
(Approximately Age 12 and Above)
• Situated Cognition
• Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory
• Thinking as Socially Shared Cognition: Two
Heads Are Better than One
• Piaget’s Legacy
• Guided Participation
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“Maria
wants to
pick the best
school for
her sons, so
she plans to
observe and
interview
teachers.”
aria is the mother of two boys, ages 4½ and 12, and she and her children
recently moved into a new community. The new community has a schoolchoice program that allows families to place their children in any
school in the district. Maria wants to pick the best school for her sons, so she
plans to observe and interview teachers and school officials at several
schools. She’s heard a lot about the importance of starting children in
school early, but her younger son will have just turned 5 when the school
year begins. Maria is concerned that he may not really be ready for formal
schooling. What should Maria look for when visiting schools and teachers?
What kinds of classroom activities and teaching methods would best foster both
of her sons’ cognitive development? How can she decide whether her younger son is
ready for kindergarten?
M
After studying this chapter, you should be able to identify several important factors that
Maria should look for. You will know the kinds of educational philosophy and practices
that can support and stimulate the cognitive growth of Maria’s children. As you work
through this chapter, create a list of at least 12 concepts that might relate to Maria’s situation. Explain how Maria could use each concept to identify the best educational
environment for her sons.
As you read this chapter, look for the questions that ask you to think about what
you’re learning from Maria’s perspective.
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he situation Maria faces is not uncommon. All of us who work with children need to
understand cognitive development so that we can be good advocates for children, recognize their strengths and limitations, and provide stimulating academic and intellectual environments. As you learned in Chapter 4, children experience tremendous physical
changes from birth through adolescence. Less visible but just as important are the enormous
changes in children’s thinking during these years. The vast differences between younger and
older children’s thinking are evident in every aspect of their lives, from the kinds of questions
children ask to the kinds of explanations they can understand or offer—and even in the kinds
of events and information they will pay attention to. These changes in thinking, in which
children’s thought gradually becomes more organized and complex, are called cognitive
development.
In this chapter we explore two of the most influential theories of cognitive development: the stage theory of Jean Piaget, and the sociocultural theory of Lev Vygotsky. Recently,
researchers asked 1,500 child development experts to name the “most revolutionary” work
published in the last half century (Dixon, 2002). According to the experts, Jean Piaget’s 1952
book The Origins of Intelligence in Children remained the most revolutionary and influential
work published since 1950! The second most important work was Lev Vygotsky’s Mind in
Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (1978). This chapter highlights the
central themes of both of these important works as well as newer sociocultural views. As you
read, you will see that these theories have had a tremendous impact on how we think about
the development of cognition in children.
T
Piaget’s Constructivist View
of Cognitive Development
The most influential theorist in the study of cognitive development was Jean Piaget, who was
born in 1896 and died in 1980. His prolific career in psychology spanned an astonishing 7
decades. One anonymous writer surmised that
assessing the impact of Piaget on developmental psychology is like assessing the impact of
Shakespeare on English literature or Aristotle on philosophy—impossible. The impact is too
monumental to embrace and at the same time too omnipresent to detect. (cited in Beilin,
1994)
After reading this section you should be able to answer the following questions:
• What influence did Piaget’s background in biology have on his theory? What are some specific
examples of this biological influence?
• What is constructivism, and why is Piaget considered a constructivist?
• According to Piaget, what processes guide children’s interaction with the environment? How do
they affect cognitive development?
Piaget as a Child Prodigy
Jean Piaget was no ordinary child. From a very early age, he showed tremendous intellectual
talent. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, a small university town, Piaget showed an early
interest in nature, particularly in observing wildlife in its natural setting. His observations
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led to the first of his many scientific publications. He was
only 10 years old when he published his first article, a onepage report on an albino sparrow he observed in a park. At
the Museum of Natural History in Neuchâtel, Piaget began
working with a zoologist who specialized in mollusks (clams,
oysters, snails, etc.). Piaget “catalogued and studied adaptation”
(Bringuier, 1980, p. 8), detailing how mollusks’ shells changed
in relation to the movement of the water in which they lived.
As you will see, the idea of adaptation came to play a
central role in Piaget’s later theory of cognitive development.
From age 15 to age 18, Piaget published a series of articles on
the mollusk research. His work was so noteworthy that a
natural history museum in Geneva offered him a position as
curator of their mollusk collection. Fortunately for psychology, he had to decline—he hadn’t graduated from high
school yet!
After earning a Ph.D. degree at 21, Piaget became interested in psychology. He worked for a time at a psychiatric clinic
in Zurich, where he learned about Freudian psychoanalysis and
how to conduct a clinical interview. Later he moved to Paris to
work with Theophile Simon in the Binet Laboratory. Theophile
Simon and Alfred Binet were known for their work on intelligence testing, and Piaget’s job in the laboratory was to help develop a standardized French version of some reasoning tasks.
Piaget later wrote that
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Jean Piaget was a pioneer in child development research.
His theory revolutionized how we view children’s thinking.
Simon wasn’t living in Paris and couldn’t oversee what I did—
luckily! . . . Simon wanted me to standardize in French the tests that
had been devised in English. . . . I became interested immediately in the way the
child reasoned and the difficulties he encountered, the mistakes he made, his reasons
for making them, and the methods he came up with in order to get to the right
answers. From the outset, I did what I’ve been doing ever since: I made qualitative
analyses instead of preparing statistics about right and wrong answers. (cited in
Bringuier, 1980, p. 9)
The years in the Binet Laboratory were important in several ways for Piaget and the
development of his theory and methods. First, he realized that children were active in their
thinking, not passive. He found that even very young children made admirable attempts to
understand and answer questions, although their reasoning was far from what an adult would
see as logical. Drawing on his biological background, he interpreted these attempts as children’s efforts to cognitively adapt to the situations they were in, to understand and succeed in
their situations. Second, Piaget began to see that children’s thinking showed a striking regularity and consistency, even though it was often incorrect. Piaget noticed that children of the
same age tended to give the same wrong answers, whereas children of a different age tended
to give different wrong answers. There seemed to be age-related patterns in the children’s
thinking. These may not seem to be groundbreaking insights today—but at that time most
experts believed that children were passive recipients of information (simply memorizing information without interpreting or modifying it) and did not have coherent or regular ways
of thinking. Piaget challenged these well-established views. Finally, Piaget realized that a clinical method, in which children are asked to explain the reasons for their answers rather than
simply to give an answer, could be an invaluable tool in his efforts to understand children’s
thinking.
Piaget’s Constructivist View of Cognitive Development
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Constructivism and Interaction with the Environment
© Laura Dwight
Piaget combined his background in biology with his interest in understanding how logic and
knowledge develop and spent the rest of his career observing children and articulating his theory of cognitive development. He applied several concepts from biology and used them to explain how knowledge develops.
Piaget’s theory is often described as a constructivist view. According to constructivists,
people interpret their environments and experiences in light of the knowledge and experiences they already have. People do not simply take in an external reality and develop an unchanged, exact mental copy of objects or events. Instead, they build (or “construct”) their
own individual understandings and knowledge. For Piaget, the essential building block for
constructivist view
cognition is the scheme. A scheme is an organized pattern of action or thought. It is a broad
The view that people conconcept and can refer to organized patterns of physical action (such as an infant reaching to
struct their own knowledge
and understanding of the
grasp an object), or mental action (such as a high school student thinking about how to solve
world by using what they alan algebra problem).
ready know and understand
As children interact with the environment, individual schemes become modified, comto interpret new experiences.
bined, and reorganized to form more complex cognitive structures. As children mature, these
scheme
structures allow more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking. These, in turn, allow chilAn organized pattern of
dren to interact in qualitatively different ways with their environment. For example, a little girl
physical action (motor
develops a scheme for noticing similarities between objects (we’ll call this a “compare” scheme)
scheme) or mental action
(mental scheme).
and a separate one for noticing differences (a “contrast” scheme). Gradually, she coordinates
and combines the two into a single cognitive structure that allows her to compare and contrast objects at the same time.
When she encounters a new object, she uses this coordinated
cognitive structure to develop a fuller understanding of the
object. The first time she encounters an avocado, for example,
she can compare and contrast it to other foods. This process
will help her determine what kind of food it is and will increase her understanding of the overall category (similar in
size to an orange, similar in color to a lime, different in texture
from an apple). Cognitive structures not only organize existing knowledge but also serve as filters for all new experiences.
That is, we interpret new experiences in light of our already
existing cognitive structures. Because no two people ever have
exactly the same experiences, no two cognitive structures ever
are exactly the same, and no two people ever interpret events
in exactly the same way. The way you interpret and understand the information you’re learning about Piaget is different
(at least slightly) from the way your classmates understand it,
because each of you filters and interprets the information
through a different cognitive structure.
Piaget believed that extensive interaction with the environment is absolutely essential for each person’s cognitive
development. Though Piaget acknowledged that biological
maturation sets the general limits within which cognitive development occurs, he placed much more emphasis on the role
of the environment. Children who have severely limited interactions with their environments simply will not have the
How is this child constructing her own understanding of
opportunities to develop and reorganize their cognitive
science concepts?
structures so as to achieve mature ways of thinking. The way
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we interact with the environment is not random, however. Three common processes guide
our interactions: organization, adaptation, and reflective abstraction. If you have studied
biology, you will recognize the influence of Piaget’s biology background in the first two of
these processes. Both concepts originate in the physical sciences, and Piaget used them in his
theory of psychological development.
Organization is the tendency of all species to form increasingly coherent and integrated
entities. For example, consider the human body. Cells themselves are organized systems of
subcellular material. And cells organize into tissues, tissues into organs, organs into organ
systems, and organ systems into the body. Piaget believed that the tendency to organize also
occurs on the psychological level—that people try to organize their knowledge into coherent
systems. In fact, Piaget believed that the tendency to organize is so basic that people cannot
keep from trying to organize their knowledge. This explains why you may find yourself thinking about something that didn’t make sense to you when you encountered it, even when you
don’t intend or want to spend time thinking about it! The advantage of this organizational
tendency is that it gives us a way to understand and interpret events and objects we encounter;
in short, it helps us function more successfully in our psychological environments. The disadvantage is, of course, that the particular way we may organize our knowledge may be completely wrong. If enough mistakes and misinterpretations occur, however, we may reexamine
our cognitive organization and perhaps make adjustments. Piaget called this later process
adaptation.
In biology the term adaptation refers to every species’ tendency to make modifications
in order to survive and succeed in the environment. (Remember how the mollusks’ shells
adapted to the water currents?) Applied to cognitive development, adaptation means changing one’s cognitive structure or one’s environment (or both to some degree) in order to better understand the environment. Figure 5.1 diagrams the steps involved in adaptation: A child
moves from assimilation through cognitive disequilibrium, accommodation, and cognitive
equilibrium, then back to a new assimilation.
Let’s explore this process using the example of Lily, a 2-year-old who is learning to
name animals, shown in Figure 5.1. Lily has a dog at home, and according to her “doggie
scheme,” “doggies” are animals that have four feet and fur and that bark and fetch balls. One
day, riding in the car with her mother, Lily points to a field with several cows and exclaims,
“Look, Mommy, doggies!” She is excited to see so many “doggies,” especially ones so large! We
can see that Lily is trying to understand these new animals by thinking about them as something she already understands: “doggies.” This is an example of assimilation, the process of
bringing new objects or information into a scheme that already exists.
Thinking of these new animals as “doggies,” Lily fully expects that they will also bark
and fetch balls. Such misunderstandings are common when we try to force new objects into
ill-fitting schemes. Her mother, however, comments, “No, those are cows. They are bigger
than dogs. And see the udders underneath? Cows give us milk.” These comments place Lily
into cognitive disequilibrium—she is confused. Lily realizes that she has never seen udders
under dogs and also has never seen dogs that large. To resolve her cognitive conflict, Lily
adjusts her understanding of animals. She adds new information about dogs (they are smaller
and don’t give us milk), and she learns a new animal (cows are like dogs but larger, and they
give milk). These adjustments are examples of accommodation, the process of modifying
old schemes, or creating new ones, to fit better with assimilated information. Now Lily can
properly identify dogs and cows, and her new success in naming the animals moves her into
cognitive equilibrium. Lily remains in cognitive equilibrium until she visits the zoo and
encounters a new animal: an elephant. How will she assimilate this animal?
Piaget, then, claimed that we try to understand new experiences by assimilating them
into the schemes or cognitive structures that we already have. If the assimilation does not
Can you think of a time
when you found yourself
wondering about an
event, a fact, or a concept
that you didn’t quite understand, even though
you didn’t intend to think
about it? As you continued to think about it, did
it finally “fall into place”
as you were able to integrate it into your cognitive
structures?
Think back over your day
so far. Can you identify an
example of assimilation in
your daily activities? Can
you think of an example
of accommodation?
organization
The tendency to form increasingly coherent and
integrated structures.
adaptation
In cognitive development,
the process of changing a
cognitive structure or the
environment (or both) in
order to understand the
environment.
assimilation
The process of bringing new
objects or information into a
scheme that already exists.
accommodation
The process of modifying
old schemes or creating new
ones to better fit assimilated
information.
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FIGURE 5.1 Adaptation and Equilibration
In the cycle of adaptation and equilibration, a new
experience is first assimilated into an existing scheme.
If it doesn’t fit properly, cognitive disequilibrium results.
Accommodating (adjusting) the scheme brings the child
to cognitive equilibrium, until a new assimilation
challenges the scheme again.
1
Lily sees her
first cow.
“Look Mommy,
doggies.”
Assimilation
6
Cognitive
Disequilibrium
2
Engage in some reflective
abstraction. What do you
notice about Piaget’s background in biology, and
what do you think about
how this background
relates to his theory of
cognitive development?
equilibration
The dynamic process of
moving between states of
cognitive disequilibrium and
equilibrium.
reflective abstraction
The process of thinking about
information and experiences.
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“But it has udders and
gives milk, and dogs
aren’t that large.”
Equilibration
Then Lily sees
an elephant . . .
Cognitive
Equilibrium
5
Accommodation
3
Change “dog scheme”: Dogs are
smaller and don’t give milk.
4
Add new “cow scheme”: Cows
are larger and give milk.
Lily properly
identifies
dogs and cows.
work completely, there is an imbalance between the new experience and the old scheme. Piaget described this imbalance as a state of cognitive disequilibrium. To resolve the disequilibrium, we accommodate, or adjust, our schemes to provide a better fit for the new experience.
If we are successful, we achieve cognitive equilibrium. Equilibration therefore is the dynamic
process of moving between states of cognitive disequilibrium and equilibrium as we assimilate new experiences and accommodate schemes.
Because of the process of organization, we are never satisfied with equilibrium. We
stretch and extend our cognitive structures by assimilating new and challenging information.
According to Piaget, the tendency to seek equilibrium is always present—we are constantly
seeking to understand—but equilibration is a dynamic process and is never fully achieved. In
other words, although we certainly have periods when we understand and deal effectively
with the environment, we never attain perfect, complete, and permanent understanding of
everything. Piaget believed that “the normal state of mind is one of disequilibrium—or rather
a state of ‘moving equilibrium’ ” (Beilin, 1994, p. 263). There are always new things to learn!
A final process that guides our thinking is reflective abstraction. In reflective abstraction we notice something in the environment (e.g., some specific property of an object or
action), then reflect on it (Ginsburg & Opper, 1988; Piaget, 1971). That is, we try to relate it
to our current cognitive structures. As a result of reflection, we modify our current cognitive
structures. For example, a boy playing on the beach may notice that the number of rocks he
has is the same regardless of whether he arranges them in a line or a circle or piles them on
top of one another. Reflective abstraction in this case involves the child’s noticing that he has
the same number of rocks, then thinking about the implication of this fact—that number is
not affected by how they are arranged. According to Piaget, we must engage in reflective abstraction in order to learn from our interactions with the environment. The process enables
us to isolate and think about specific properties, compare and contrast them, and think about
how we understand them. In this way reflective abstraction leads to the accommodation of
cognitive structures. A child can notice something in the environment, but if he does not
think about its meaning or its relation to what he already knows, no cognitive reorganization
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will occur. In our earlier example, Lily would not have accommodated her understanding of
“doggies” if she had not (1) noticed that the cows were much larger than dogs (and had
udders), and (2) reflected or thought about what this meant.
The processes of organization, adaptation, and reflective abstraction play important
roles in children’s development. First, children are naturally curious. They are constantly
probing and exploring their environments, looking for ways to challenge their existing
schemes, and reflecting on whether the things they encounter make sense to them. But
without opportunities for exploration and stimulating experiences, there would be
nothing new to assimilate. Second, cognitive disequilibrium is a precursor to learning.
When children are confused and perplexed, they are ready to make adjustments—they
are ready to make accommodations in their schemes. Although it may be tempting to
think of confusion as a sign of failure or as something to avoid, in Piaget’s system it is a
necessary step toward success. Finally, the concept of constructivism is embedded in the
cycle. Faced with disequilibrium, children will accommodate their own schemes, engage in
reflective abstraction, and improve and reorganize their cognitive structures. In short, children do not passively absorb structures from the adults and other people around them. They
actively create their own accommodations and so construct their own understandings.
OF MARIA
What kinds of teaching
practices could Maria look
for that would help her find
a teacher who uses Piaget’s
concepts of constructivism,
adaptation, organization,
and reflective abstraction?
LET’S REVIEW . . .
1.
Adaptation is an important concept in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, and this concept can be traced back to Piaget’s early work in:
a. psychology.
b. biology.
c. philosophy.
d. physics.
2.
In Piaget’s theory, an organized pattern of action or thought is called a(n):
a. scheme.
b. adaptation.
c. assimilation.
d. organization.
3.
Two-year-old David points to a pickup truck and says, “Look, Mommy, a red car!” Calling the
truck a car is an example of what Piaget would call:
a. equilibration.
b. accommodation.
c. abstraction.
d. assimilation.
4.
When you consider Piaget’s cycle of adaptation, what condition comes immediately before
accommodation?
a. assimilation
b. cognitive
c. cognitive
d. organization
equilibrium
disequilibrium
5.
True or False: Piaget is referred to as a “constructivist” because he believed that children
learn primarily by copying the cognitive structures that have been constructed by the adults
and other more mature people around them.
6.
True or False: In Piaget’s theory, cognitive equilibrium is achieved when children accommodate
their schemes so they provide a better fit with new experiences.
Answers: 1. b, 2. a, 3. d, 4. c, 5. F, 6. T
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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
We have seen that children adapt individual schemes (like “doggie” and “cow”) through equilibration. We might refer to this type of equilibration as microequilibration—the equilibration
of individual schemes. Piaget also described a process that we might call macroequilibration,
or the equilibration of larger and more comprehensive cognitive structures. Remember that
in biology cells organize into tissues, and tissues form the body. When enough individual cells
change or adapt to their environment, the effects can be seen in the tissues and in the body as
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
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TABLE 5.1 Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development
COGNITIVE STAGE
LIMITATIONS
ACHIEVEMENTS
Sensorimotor Thought: Birth to
2 years (p. 5-10)
• No representational thought; infants cannot
form internal symbols early in this stage.
• Representational, symbolic thought gradually
emerges as the stage progresses.
• Object permanence is lacking early in this
stage.
• Object permanence develops as the stage
progresses.
• Intuitive logic leads to egocentrism, animism,
artificialism, and an inability to use more
objective forms of logic.
• Flourishing mental representations and symbols
are seen in language, art, and play.
Preoperational Thought: 2 to 7
years (p. 5-13)
• Schemes are not reversible, not operational.
• Children fail conservation tasks because of
centration, focus on static endpoints, and
lack of reversibility.
Concrete Operational Thought:
7 to 12 years (p. 5-18)
• Logic is limited to concrete, tangible materials
and experiences.
• Logical thought is more objective, allows skills
like class inclusion and transitivity.
• Schemes can be reversible, operational.
• Children pass conservation problems due to
decentration, focus on dynamic transformations,
reversibility.
Formal Operational Thought:
12 years and up (p. 5-19)
• Adolescent egocentrism is seen in the
imaginary audience and personal fable.
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning emerges.
• Abstract thought emerges.
a whole. In cognitive development, as individual schemes adapt, larger cognitive structures
emerge and change. The microequilibrations eventually lead to macroequilibrations. When
these larger structures are modified and reorganized, new and more powerful ways of thinking become possible. According to Piaget, children grow through four stages of cognitive development. Each stage involves certain skills and limitations, as summarized in Table 5.1.
After reading this section you should be able to answer the following questions:
• What are the main limitations in cognitive processing at each of the stages?
• What new cognitive structures, forms of logical thought, or other cognitive advances emerge
during each stage?
• What is the practical usefulness of understanding Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?
Stage 1: Sensorimotor Thought (Birth to 2 Years)
sensorimotor thought
Thought that is based only on
sensory input and physical
(motor) actions.
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According to Piaget, infants can engage only in sensorimotor thought. That is, they know the
world only in terms of their own sensory input (what they can see, smell, taste, touch, and
hear) and their physical or motor actions on it (e.g., sucking, reaching, and grasping). They
do not have internal mental representations of the objects and events that exist outside their
own body. For example, consider what happens when you give 3-month-old Latoya a plastic
rattle. Latoya grasps the rattle tightly in her hand, shakes it back and forth, and rubs it against
her cheek. Then Latoya brings the rattle to her mouth to explore it in detail by sucking and
biting on it. Finally, she flings the rattle to the floor and stares brightly back at you. Now, what
does Latoya “know” about the rattle?
According to Piaget, Latoya doesn’t know anything about the rattle unless she is having
direct sensory or motor contact with it. At the time that she is grasping and shaking the rattle,
she knows how it feels in her hand and how it moves and sounds when she shakes it. She can
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What does this infant understand about her rattle? If she drops the rattle out of sight, will she know
that it still exists?
feel its smooth surface against her cheek. She knows more about the detailed bumps, curves,
and textures when she has it in her mouth. After she flings it to the floor, however, she has no
way of maintaining an internalized representation of the rattle. She therefore cannot “think”
about the rattle, and she doesn’t know or remember anything about it.
Most adults take mental representation for granted. When we study an object, we form
a mental code or image that represents what we know, and we can access this image later
when the object is no longer physically available. We are capable of symbolic (representational) thought—the ability to form symbols in our mind that represent (or stand for) objects or events in the world. Piaget claimed that young infants cannot form symbols and are
therefore stuck in the here-and-now world of their immediate sensory and motor actions.
Piaget believed that representational thought gradually emerges as babies develop the ability
to form mental symbols. This represents an important achievement, because the emergence
of representational thought frees children from the here and now. With representational
thought, children can think about past events and anticipate future interactions. Mental representation also allows children to communicate with others using language. By definition,
language of any type requires that arbitrary symbols (words) represent actual things. Without mental representation, it is impossible to learn words and understand what they stand for.
Piaget proposed six substages of sensorimotor thought that describe how representational thought emerges during infancy. These substages are summarized in Table 5.2. If you
look carefully across the substages, you will notice a general trend in babies’ thinking. Infants
begin in the early stages as simply reflexive—that is, reacting to environmental stimuli via inborn reflexes. They have no voluntary control over objects or events in their environment but
can only react to whatever takes place. Gradually, however, infants begin to take more control. These first attempts occur because infants accidentally notice the effects of certain random actions. They begin trying to understand events by using trial and error, taking actions
and simply observing what happens, then slightly modifying the actions, observing, and so
on. Initially these trial-and-error interactions are observations of effects with no anticipation
of what the outcomes might be. Eventually, however, babies show evidence of i
