Describe Piaget's sensorimotor stage of development, including follow-up research on Piaget's ideas

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

According to Piaget, specific psychological structures called schemes, change with age. At first, schemes are sensorimotor action patterns. Sensorimotor—the name of the stage—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.
The circular reaction involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby's own motor activity. It provides a special means of adapting her first schemes. The reaction is "circular" because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme. She starts to gain voluntary control over her actions through the primary circular reaction, by repeating chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs. This leads to some simple motor habits. Through the secondary circular reaction, she tries to repeat interesting events—through intentional, or goal-directed, behaviors—in the surrounding environment that are caused by her own actions. As she begins to master object permanence and imitation, the tertiary circular reaction, or repeated behaviors with variation, emerges.
In Piaget's theory, infants lead purely sensorimotor lives. Yet research indicates that, beginning at 8 to 10 months, babies can recall the location of hidden objects, indicating that babies construct mental representations of objects and their whereabouts. And in studies of deferred imitation, categorization, and problem solving, representational thought is evident even earlier. Researchers disagree on how babies arrive at these impressive attainments. One view holds that older infants and toddlers categorize more effectively because they become increasingly sensitive to fine-grained perceptual features and to stable relations among these features. An alternative view is that before the end of the first year, babies undergo a fundamental shift from a perceptual to a conceptual basis for constructing categories.
Consistent with Piaget's ideas, sensorimotor action helps infants construct some forms of knowledge. Yet we have also seen evidence that infants comprehend a great deal before they are capable of the motor behaviors that Piaget assumed led to those understandings.