12.1: Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the characteristics and developmental tasks of Piaget's sensorimotor stage.

Jean Piaget is the most notable theorist in the field of children's cognitive development. He believed that children's cognitive development occurs in stages. He explained this growth in the following stages:

1. Sensory Motor Stage (Birth through 2 years old)
2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years old)
3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years old)
4. Formal Operational Stage (12 years old- adulthood)

In this cognitive chapter we will focus on his first stage which occurs in infancy and toddlerhood.¹

Piaget and Sensorimotor Intelligence

Piaget describes intelligence in infancy as sensorimotor, meaning it is based on direct, physical contact. Infants taste, feel, pound, push, hear, and move to experience the world. Let’s explore the transition infants make from responding to the external world reflexively as newborns to solving problems using mental strategies as two-year-olds.

Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): Substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage²

Substage	Age	Description
Substage One: Simple Reflexes	Birth to 1 month	This active learning begins with automatic movements or reflexes. A ball comes into contact with an infant’s cheek and is automatically sucked on and licked.
Substage Two: Primary Circular Reactions	1 to 4 months	The infant begins to discriminate between objects and adjust responses accordingly as reflexes are replaced with voluntary movements. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and find it interesting, such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it again and helps the infant learn a new behavior that originally occurred by chance. Initially, most actions are focused on the body, but in the months to come, they will be directed more toward objects.
Substage Three: Secondary Circular Reactions	4 to 8 months	The infant becomes increasingly actively engaged with the outside world and takes delight in being able to make things happen. Repeated motion brings particular interest as the infant can bang two lids together from the cupboard when seated on the kitchen floor.
Substage Four: Coordination of circular reactions	8 to 12 months	The infant can engage in behaviors that others perform and anticipate upcoming events. Perhaps because of the continued maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the infant becomes capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned, goal-directed activity, such as seeking a toy that has rolled under the couch. The object continues to exist in the infant’s mind even when out of sight, and the infant is now capable of making attempts to retrieve it.
Substage Five: Tertiary Circular Reactions	12 to 18 months	The infant more actively engages in experimentation to learn about the physical world. Gravity is learned by pouring water from a cup or pushing bowls from high chairs. The caregiver tries to help the child by picking it up again and placing it on the tray. And what happens? Another experiment! The child pushes it off the tray again, causing it to fall and the caregiver to pick it up again!
Substage Six: Internalization of Schemes and Early Representational Thought	18 months to 2 years	The child is now able to solve problems using mental strategies, recall information heard days before, repeat it, engage in pretend play, and locate objects that have been moved, even when they are out of sight. Take, for instance, the child who is upstairs in a room with the door closed, supposedly taking a nap. The doorknob has a safety device on it that prevents the child from turning the knob. After trying several times in vain to push the door or turn the doorknob, the child carries out a mental strategy learned from prior experience to get the door opened- he knocks on the door! The child is now better equipped with mental strategies for problem-solving.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): An infant sitting in a highchair. Image by holycalamity is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget introduced a new perspective on infants and toddlers, suggesting that their primary task is to coordinate their sensory impressions with their motor activity. However, the infant’s cognitive world is not as neatly packaged as Piaget portrayed it, and some of Piaget’s explanations for the cause of change are debated. Over the past several decades, sophisticated experimental techniques have been developed to study infants, resulting in a large number of research studies on infant development. Much of the new research suggests that Piaget’s view of sensorimotor development needs to be modified (Baillargeon, 2014; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2014; Johnson & Hannon, 2015).

Object Permanence

One necessary modification would be to make when children develop object permanence. Infants appear to be able to recognize that objects have permanence at much younger ages (as young as 3.5 months) than Piaget proposed (between 6 and 8 months old).

The A-not-B Error

The data does not always support Piaget’s claim that certain processes are crucial in transitions from one stage to the next. For example, in Piaget’s theory, an important feature in the progression into substage 4, coordination of secondary circular reactions, is an infant’s inclination to search for a hidden object in a familiar location rather than to look for the object in a new location. Thus, if a toy is hidden twice, initially at location A and subsequently at location B, 8- to 12-month-old infants search correctly for the toy at location A initially. However, when the toy is subsequently hidden at location B, they make the mistake of continuing to search for it at location A. This common mistake is referred to as an A-not-B error. Older infants are less likely to make the A-not-B error because their concept of object permanence is more complete.

Researchers have found, however, that the A-not-B error does not consistently appear (Sophian, 1985). The evidence indicates that A-not-B errors are sensitive to the delay between hiding the object at B and the infant’s attempt to find it (Diamond, 1985). Thus, the A-not-B error might be due to a failure in memory. Another explanation is that infants tend to repeat a previous motor behavior (Clearfield & others, 2006; Smith, 1999).

Video	Video Description and Text Link
	Demonstration of the A not B error with an older infant. Text link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDAEvLaW_lw

References and Attributions

1. Children’s Development by Ana R. Leon is licensed under CC BY 4.0

2. Children’s Development by Ana R. Leon is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23(5), 655–664.

Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2014). Gaze following: A mechanism for building social connections between infants and adults. In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Mechanisms of social connection: From brain to group (pp. 167–183). American Psychological Association.

Clearfield, M. W., Diedrich, F. J., Smith, L. B., & Thelen, E. (2006). Young infants reach correctly in A-not-B tasks: On the development of stability and perseveration. Infant Behavior and Development, 29(3), 435–444.

Diamond, A. (1985). Development of the ability to use recall to guide action, as indicated by infants' performance on AB. Child Development, 56(4), 868–883.

Johnson, S. P., & Hannon, E. E. (2015). Perceptual development. In R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology and developmental science (7th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 127–160). Wiley.

Smith, L. B. (1999). Do infants possess innate knowledge structures? The con side. Developmental Science, 2(2), 133–144.

Sophian, C. (1985). Infants' understanding of visible displacement and its relation to search behavior. Child Development, 56(4), 805–809.