Jean Piaget Habituation Essay

During the Sensorimotor stage (between birth and the age of two), Piaget claims that sensory and motor skills are developed, as well as claiming that infants are unable to grasp object permeance until eighteen to twenty-four months; Piaget argued that if a child could not see the item, it no longer existed to them. When the child’s age was between nine and ten months, more experiments were done into object permeance, resulting in the 'a not b ' test, in which one object was hidden underneath an item, and then switched. Despite the obvious difference in sizes underneath the two objects, the child would still believe the item to be under where it was originally found. Furthermore, Aguiara and Baillargeon (2002), suggested the violation of expectation; using the example of a doll moving between two opaque objects and reappearing in the centre – the child will then be surprised, as to them the object had no longer existed.

Jean Piaget developed his theory of cognitive development to show how humans develop intelligence. The first stage in Piaget’s theory is the sensorimotor period which lasts from birth to around the age of two. In this stage infants begin to develop their intelligence by interacting with the world around them. One of the primary way infants interact with the world is though natural reflexes, which exist cross-cultural, and by physically and visually observing the world around them. In the film all the infants are shown growing and learning from what are very different environments, but each child is still learning the same lessons through their environment. One moment in the film this is shown is when the infants are playing with toys, specifically a crib mobile. While not every child has a crib or a mobile as we think of one in western culture, the film cuts between each child playing with some form of toy that either hangs above their sleeping area or is held by a parent or sibling. Another part of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage is the development of habits. The film shows these habits forming in all the infants in simple ways, Panijao reaching for something or Hattie reaching for a finger to place in her mouth. The film shows that despite the infants developing in different environments and cultures they still grow and learn in much

The purpose of this paper is to use the habituation technique in young infants to evaluate one hypothesis derived from piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I will compare 5-months olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. Children in the sensorimotor stage experience the world through their senses and actions by looking, hearing, and touching. Object permanence is the recognition that things continue to exist even when they do not. Piaget would explain the absence of object permanence in young infants in which that infants

Cognitively, the way infants process information undergoes rapid changes during the infant’s first year. For instance, the Piagetian theory of cognitive development includes (1) the sensorimotor stage in which infants, through trial an error, build their understanding of things around the world (e.g. imitation of familiar behaviour); (p. 203, Chapter 6); (2) building schemas (e.g. a 5 month old child can move or drop an object fairly rigidly, whereas an older child can do the same action but with more intentional and creative movement);(p. 202, Chapter 6) and (3) the concept of object permanence (e.g. an infant knows that an object exists even though it is hidden encourages the child’s perceptual skills and awareness of the objects ‘realness’ in the world (p.

Most of the criticism of Piaget’s work is in regards to his research methods. A major source of his inspiration for the theory was based on his observations of his own children. And because of this small sample group, people believe that it is difficult and incorrect to generalise his findings to a larger population. Similarly, many psychologists believe that Piaget underestimated the age which children could accomplish certain tasks and that sometimes children understand a concept before they are able to demonstrate their understanding of it. For example, children in the Sensorimotor stage may not search for a hidden object because their motor skills are not developed, rather than because they lack object permanence. This has been supported by evidence from Bower & Wishart (1972). They found that the way that an object is made to disappear influences the child’s response. As well as this, Piaget’s theory has been said to overestimate that every child and adult reaches the formal operational stage of knowledge development. Dasen (1994) claims that only a third of adults ever reach this stage.

According to Piaget (1929, 1954, 1963), the process of adaptation helps us to understand how a child constructs his/her world. Taking Piaget's theory of Cognitive Development with particular focus on the Sensori-Motor stage of development, I am going to discuss how understanding this stage might influence me when working with a baby as a nursing student in the future.

Piaget believe that children are active thinkers. He recognized that the mind develops through a series of irreversible stages. He also acknowledged that a child’s maturing brain builds schemas that are constantly assimilating and accommodating to the world around them. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to nearly two years of age. At this stage, infants learn about the world around them by sensing it and interacting within it. It is also in this stage that the idea of object permanence develops, that is, the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are not being observed. In my personal life, I am certain that in this stage of development I would have enjoyed peek-a-boo, because if I didn’t see it, to my developing mind, it wasn’t there at all. The second stage, preoperational, lasts from two years of age to seven years of

Piaget stated that from birth to age 2, an infant’s knowledge of the world is limited to their sensory perceptions and motor activities, thus the child learns about him/herself and his/her environment through motor and reflex actions. Thought derives from sensation and movement. The child learns that he/ she is separate from his/her environment and that aspects of his/ her environment, the parents or favourite toy, continue to exist even though they may be outside the

     Piaget proposed that object permanence doesn’t develop until during what he identifies as the sensorimotor stage. The sensorimotor stage he identifies as being from birth to about two years of age. Piaget broke the sensorimotor stage down into six sub stages. Piaget also broke down the idea of object permanence according to the sub stages of the sensorimotor stage. During the first stage of object permanence which is roughly between the ages of birth to one month old, an infant will look at an object only while it is directly in front of their eyes. However, if an object was to move to the left of right of an infants direct line of vision, the infant would no longer look at the object. During the second sub stage which lasted from one to four months, Piaget said that infants will look for an extended period of time to an area where an object had disappeared from. He said that an infant will not however, follow the object if it were to move out of their line of sight. In the third sub stage which is between the ages of four and eight months, an infant will anticipate where a moving object will go and they will begin to look for the object there. They will only do this though if the object is partially visible, they will not make

Habituation is applied in discovering the perceptual systems which indicates that children advance earlier in developing perception compared to the acquiring the idea of the permanence of objects. Vision, hearing, smell and taste, language, touch, and pain are the early infant sensorimotor perceptual improvement in the infants’ mental growth. Motor development, required for the child to create relationships between vision, touch and

Piaget’s theory can be broken into two substages: the symbolic function substage and the intuitive thought substage. The symbolic function is when the child is able to represent an object that is not there physically or mentally. This stage also consists of egocentrism and animism. Egocentrism is the inability for one to separate between their own perspective and someone’s else. While, animism is the belief that something that is not animated have life like qualities and are also capable of actions. An example of animism would be when asking my niece, “Do you believe that dolls can come to life?”, she answered that she believe her dolls come to life at night when she is asleep and when she wakes up they stop. The intuitive thought substage is the second substage and it occurs normally when the child is around 4 to 7 years of age. It is called the intuitive thought stage because during this stage the child knows a lot but doesn’t know

Although infant perception differs in terms of acuity, infant perception on size and shape constancy requires less development. Adults understand that objects have a constant shape and size, regardless of their distance, and the angle of perception. The developmental question lies on whether size and shape principles guide infant perception, or whether constancies are developed through experience. This argument is one of many in exploring whether infants learn through cognitive adaptations, or whether they learn through experience and what the environment offers them. Previous assumptions by Piaget, state that these principles were not present at birth, but developed towards the end of the first year. This

In the first, or sensorimotor, stage (birth to two years), knowledge is gained primarily through sensory impressions and motor activity. Through these two modes of learning, experienced both separately and in combination, infants gradually learn to control their own bodies and objects in the external world. Toward the end of Piaget¡¦s career, he brought about the idea that action is actually the primary source of knowledge and that perception and language are more secondary roles. He claimed that action is not random, but has organization, as well as logic. Infants from birth to four months however, are incapable of thought and are unable to differentiate themselves from others or from the environment. To infants, objects only exist when they are insight

On Piaget's task for conservation of length, Piaget shows the subject two pencils equal in length and subject knows the pencils are the same length. But once one of the pencils is moved longer than the other one, the subject fails to recognize that they were the same. Piaget's task for conservation for liquid, he shows the young child two identical glasses, then he pours the same amount of water both glasses. The subject knows that the two glasses of water are equal. But if water from one glass is poured into a longer thinner glass, the subject couldn’t comprehend this glass contains the same amount of water as the original two identical glasses. Piaget's explains that children's thinking is "perception bound" in preoperational stage, so they can’t focus their attention on two aspects of the new glass, they were attentive only to one aspect which is that one glass is taller than the other two; failing to realize the taller glass had the same amount of liquid.

The first stage of Piaget’s development theory is the sensorimotor stage which takes place in children most commonly 0 to 2 years old. In this stage, thought is developed through direct physical interactions with the environment. Three major cognitive leaps in this stage are the development of early schemes, the development of goal-oriented behavior, and the development of object permanence. During the early stages, infants are only aware of what is immediately in front of them. They focus on what they