Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 3, Issue 2, April 1988, Pages 113-136
Cognitive Development

How to build a baby: On the development of an accessible representational system

https://doi.org/10.1016/0885-2014(88)90015-9Get rights and content

Abstract

The notion of a sensorimotor stage in infancy is called into question. First, some of the recent experimental literature on cognitive development in infancy is examined to determine the kinds of representational capacity that these data require. It is concluded that most of the recent work on perceptual development and the object concept in infancy is compatible with the notion of a sensorimotor stage but that other work showing imitation, motor recognition, the acquisition of manual signs, and recall of absent objects is not, requiring, instead, a conceptual form of representation. Such a system is apparent early in development. It is suggested that there is a viable alternative to Piaget's theory that conceptual representation consists of a transformation of sensorimotor schemas into a new, more advanced code. It is proposed that an accessible conceptual system develops simultaneously and in parallel with the sensorimotor system, with neither system being derivative from the other. It is further proposed that the mechanism by which infants encode information into an accessible system consists of a process of perceptual analysis.

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    Preparation of this article was supported in part by NSF research grant BNS-8519218 and the MacArthur Foundation research grant on the Transition from Infancy to Early Childhood. I wish to thank Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Alan Leslie, and John Morton for stimulating discussion on these issues and Elizabeth Bates, Rochel Gelman, and Katherine Nelson for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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