Glossary / Lexicon

- Sensory Motor Stage (0 - 24 months) (Piaget) : Sensory Motor Stage (0 - 24 months) refers to the first of the four (4) stages Piaget uses to define cognitive development. During this period, infants are busy discovering relationships between their bodies and the environment. Researchers have discovered that infants have relatively well developed sensory abilities. The child relies on seeing,touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn things about themselves and the environment. This stage was called the sensorimotor stage because the early manifestations of intelligence appear from sensory perceptions and motor activities.

Through countless informal experiments, infants develop the concept of seperate selves, that is, the infant realizes that the external world is not an extension of themselves.

Infants realize that an object can be moved by a hand (concept of causality), and develop notions of displacement and events. An important discovery during the latter part of the sensorimotor stage is the concept of "object permanence".