Should children, at this point in their development, fail to develop any inhibitory activity, they will not be able to manipulate objects at all. All they will be capable of is a reactive but not a goal-oriented grasp.
The same applies on an ontogenetically more advanced level to associations (between stimuli and action schemes) that were appropriate at one time in the past, but have now become both automated and purposeless. From such a point of view cognitive representations have to integrate and organize “lower-level” building blocks or codes (see also Perrig &
Hofer, 1989; Viviani, 1986). Within such a system or architecture, learning can be treated as a product of developing
and modifying the mediating cognitive-perceptual structures in motor memory.