![]() For perceptual learning theorists, learning was considered to proceed rapidly due to the initial availability of exploration patterns that infants use to obtain information about the objects and events of their perceptual worlds (Gibson, 1969). He concluded that the world of young infants is an egocentric fusion of the internal and external worlds and that the development of an accurate representation of physical reality depends on the gradual coordination of schemes of looking, listening, and touching.Īfter Piaget, others studied how newborns begin to integrate sight and sound and explore their perceptual worlds. While Piaget observed that infants actually seek environmental stimulation that promotes their intellectual development, he thought that their initial representations of objects, space, time, causality, and self are constructed only gradually during the first 2 years. From close observations of infants and careful questioning of children, he concluded that cognitive development proceeds through certain stages, each involving radically different cognitive schemes. Beginning in the 1920s, Piaget argued that the young human mind can best be described in terms of complex cognitive structures. In short, the mind of the young child has come to life (Bruner, 1972, 1981a, b Carey and Gelman, 1991 Gardner, 1991 Gelman and Brown, 1986 Wellman and Gelman, 1992).Ī major move away from the tabula rasa view of the infant mind was taken by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. It is now known that very young children are competent, active agents of their ownĬonceptual development. Armed with new methodologies, psychologists began to accumulate a substantial body of data about the remarkable abilities that young children possess that stands in stark contrast to the older emphases on what they lacked. It became clear that with carefully designed methods, one could find ways to pose rather complex questions about what infants and young children know and can do. Until recently, there was no obvious way for them to demonstrate otherwise.īut challenges to this view arose. Since babies are born with a limited repertoire of behaviors and spend most of their early months asleep, they certainly appear passive and unknowing. It was further thought that language is an obvious prerequisite for abstract thought and that, in its absence, a baby could not have knowledge. For much of this century, most psychologists accepted the traditional thesis that a newborn’s mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) on which the record of experience is gradually impressed. ![]() ![]() It was once commonly thought that infants lack the ability to form complex ideas. ![]()
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