Piaget's Stages Of Child Development

The first stage is the Sensorimotor stage. This is the period when a baby’s early focus is on physical sensations and developing physical coordination. Piaget suggests children learn by trial and error about physical movement of their own body of external objects. They also develop the understanding that other people are separate objects. At around 8 months old, the baby develops ‘Object Permanence’ which is the idea that the child has an understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight. In a study, Piaget found that very young babies will switch their attention from an object as soon as it is put out of sight, whereas when about 8 months old, the baby will continue to look for the object, when it has been hidden. One weakness of this study is that the younger infants under 8 months old may have ceased searching for the toy for reasons such as lack of interest, or believing the toy was forbidden due to the deliberate concealing.
Baillargeon performed a study 5-6 year-old infants, which saw two test events. In the first event, a toy rabbit travelled along a track; the centre of this track was hidden by a screen that had a large window in its upper half. The only difference between the two test events was in the height of the rabbit. In one event (expected event), the rabbit was shorter than the lower edge of the window; in the other (unexpected event), the rabbit was taller than the window's lower edge. In both events, the rabbit travelled along the track, disappearing at one end of the screen and reappearing at the other, without appearing in the