Development through Sensorimotor Coordination

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Piaget (1952) described a pattern of infant activity that he called a secondary circular reaction. A rattle would be placed in a four-month-old infant’s hands. As the infant moved the rattle, it would both come into sight and also make a noise, arousing and agitating the infant and causing more body motions, and thus causing the rattle to move into and out of sight and to make more noise. Infants at this age have very little organized control over hand and eye movement. They cannot yet reach for a rattle and if given one, they do not necessarily shake it. But if the infant accidentally moves it, and sees and hears the consequences, the infant will become captured by the activity—moving and shaking, looking and listening—and incrementally through this repeated action gaining intentional control over the shaking of the rattle. Piaget thought that this pattern of activity—an accidental action that leads to an interesting and arousing outcome and thus more activity and the re-experience of the outcome—to be foundational to development itself. Circular reactions are perception-action loops that create opportunities for learning. In the case of the rattle, the repeated activity teaches how to control one’s body, which actions bring held objects into view, and how sights, sounds and actions correspond. Edelman (1987) also pointed to the coupling of heterogeneous sensorimotor systems in the creation of cognition. Edelman’s theory starts by recognizing the multimodal nature of the brain at birth; it is—from the start—a complex system made up of many heterogeneous, overlapping, interacting and densely connected subsystems. Like Piaget, Edelman proposed that development occurs through activity dependent processes. 4