Читать книгу Infants and Children in Context - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 262

“There you go, little guy,” Mateo’s uncle says, placing a rattle within the infant’s grasp. Six-month-old Mateo shakes the toy and puts it in his mouth, sucking on it. He then removes the rattle from his mouth and gives it a vigorous shake, dropping it to the ground. “Mateo! Where’s your rattle?” asks his mother. “Whenever he drops his toy, he never looks for it,” she explains to Nico’s uncle, “Not even when it’s his favorite toy.” Mateo displays sensorimotor thinking. During the sensorimotor stage, from birth to about 2 years old, infants learn about the world through their senses and motor skills. To think about an object, they must act on it by viewing it, listening to it, touching it, smelling it, and tasting it. Piaget (1952) believed that infants are not capable of mental representation—thinking about an object using mental pictures. They also lack the ability to remember and think about objects and events when they are not present. Instead, in order to think about an object, an infant must experience it through both the visual and tactile senses. The sensorimotor period of reasoning, as Piaget conceived of it, progresses through six substages in which cognition develops from reflexes to intentional action to symbolic representation. At each stage infants are driven to learn and explore the world.