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Summarize and evaluate Piaget's theory of infant
development.
In Piaget's theory, children actively construct their own cognitive worlds, building mental
structures to adapt to their world. Schemes are actions or mental representations that orga
nize knowledge. Behavioral schemes (physical activities) characterize infancy, whereas men-
tal schemes (cognitive activities) develop in childhood. Assimilation occurs when children
use their existing schemes to deal with new information; accommodation refers to children's
adjustment of their schemes in the face of new information. Through organization, children
group isolated behaviors into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system.
Equilibration is a mechanism Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one cogni-
tive stage to the next. As children experience cognitive conflict in trying to understand the
world, they use assimilation and accommodation to attain equilibrium. The result is a new
stage of thought. According to Piaget, there are four qualitatively different stages of thought.
The first of these, the sensorimotor stage, is described in this chapter. The other three stages
are discussed in subsequent chapters.