Piaget's Sensorimotor Stage Of Brain Development

From birth to two years old, the changes in a child, both cognitive and physical, are enormous. According to Piaget’s sensorimotor stage, children learn through sensory and motor experiences. By “touching, mouthing, watching, and listening, as well as all fine motor and gross motor activity” (Beitz, 2012, para. 12), a child explores her world. In addition, there are learning capacities that are used to teach children including classical conditioning, operant conditioning, habituation, and imitation. In this essay, I will discuss how the Sensorimotor stage of Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory applies to the learning capacities in brain development in children from birth to two years old. Classical conditioning is an example of touching
Operant conditioning is described as how children react to their environment and behavior based on reinforcers or punishment. Parents often play with their child smiling and laughing at them. When a child responds to her parent by smiling and cooing, her parent will respond in the same way. This is an example of operant conditioning where the reinforcer is pleasant. If the parent frowns at a child’s behavior, punishment would discourage the behavior. Operant conditioning is an important aspect of how a child develops relationships. Another example of operant conditioning is how a child learns to push the handle on a musical toy to hear music. The music is the reinforcer of the child’s
Habituation refers to a child’s ability to remember something gradually changes in responsiveness due to multiple appearances of the same stimulus. Newborns react to new and different images and actions (recovery to a novel stimulus). For example, a new rattle would get a baby’s attention, but the child would not really remember it. However, as a child grows and develops, she will remember that rattle (recovery to the familiar stimulus). Based on Piaget’s sensorimotor stage, a child uses her eyes, ears, and hands to establish a long term memory of the rattle. Imitation is another learning capacity where watching, listening and fine motor skills are utilized. Babies are born with the ability to imitate their parent’s expressions and movements. However, as an infant develops, imitation becomes an effective way to learn. By watching others, a child learns more about her world and themselves (Berk, & Meyers, 2016). In addition, as an infant becomes more involved in imitating others, the parent-child bond grows stronger, establishing a