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Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development

Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development

The sensorimotor stage, the initial phase of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, spans the first two years of a child's life. During this period, infants actively engage with their surroundings, building cognitive awareness through direct interaction with the world. This interaction is primarily based on sensory perception and motor actions, allowing infants to gradually understand basic physical properties and predict how objects interact within their environment.
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Piaget's Stage 2 of Cognitive Development

Piaget's Stage 2 of Cognitive Development

The preoperational stage, the second of Jean Piaget's four stages of cognitive development, spans approximately ages 2 to 7 and is characterized by the emergence of symbolic thinking. During this stage, children use language, images, and symbols to represent objects and concepts, enabling them to engage in imaginative and pretend play. This symbolic thinking supports children's ability to perform make-believe actions, such as imagining a broom as a horse or their hand as a phone, blending...

The Nativist Approach

The Nativist Approach

The nativist approach to infant cognitive development proposes that infants are born with inherent knowledge structures that allow them to interpret the world almost immediately. This perspective contrasts with earlier developmental theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget, which emphasized a more gradual acquisition of cognitive abilities through interaction with the environment. One key concept in this approach is object permanence — the understanding that objects continue to...

Perception

Perception

Perception is a fundamental psychological process that enables individuals to organize, interpret, and consciously experience sensory information. This process is crucial for understanding and interacting with the world around us. It includes both bottom-up and top-down processing, each playing a distinct role in how we perceive our environment.
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Factors Affecting Perception

Factors Affecting Perception

Perception is influenced by perceptual set, context, motivation, and emotion. Perceptual set, or perceptual expectancy, refers to the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, influenced by previous experiences and expectations. This phenomenon affects the interpretation of stimuli, creating a set of mental tendencies and assumptions that impact sensory perceptions of sound, taste, touch, and sight.
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Perceptual Constancy

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Perceptual constancy is the ability to recognize that objects remain consistent and unchanged even when their appearance varies due to changes in sensory input. There are four main types of perceptual constancy: size constancy, shape constancy, color constancy, and brightness constancy.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 14, 2025

How to Obtain Reliable Visual Event-related Potentials in Newborns

How to Obtain Reliable Visual Event-related Potentials in Newborns

Published on: October 24, 2019

Eight-Month-Old Infants' Perception of Possible and Impossible Events.

Cara H Cashon¹, Leslie B Cohen¹

¹Department of Psychology University of Texas at Austin.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

|July 19, 2020

Summary

This study suggests 8-month-old infants may not grasp object permanence as previously thought. Instead, their responses in rotating screen tasks appear driven by perceptual novelty, not event possibility.

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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Published on: July 1, 2015

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Development
Infant Perception

Background:

Previous research, notably Baillargeon's (1987) rotating screen studies, suggested infants possess object permanence.
These studies used "live" stimuli to infer infant understanding of object persistence.

Purpose of the Study:

To re-examine 8-month-old infants' perception of object permanence.
To investigate if infants respond to the possibility/impossibility of events or perceptual novelty.

Main Methods:

Utilized computer-animated stimuli replicating Baillargeon's rotating screen paradigm.
Habituated 48 eight-month-old infants to one of four animated events.
Tested infants on all four events involving a rotating screen and a block's presence or absence.

Main Results:

Infants' responses did not align with the predicted possibility or impossibility of the animated events.
Evidence suggests infants reacted based on perceptual novelty rather than object permanence.
Findings align with Schilling (this issue) and Bogartz et al. (this issue).

Conclusions:

The study challenges the interpretation of Baillargeon's (1987) results as definitive proof of early object permanence.
Infant responses in these tasks may be better explained by perceptual novelty.
Further research is needed to fully understand infant cognitive development and object perception.