Your baby’s very first playmates are their parents and other caregivers. Responsive interactions, such as talking to babies and responding to their actions, will encourage exploration and build their brains.

Babies at this age (0 – 2 years) are in the sensorimotor stage - the first of the four stages in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. It is a period of very fast cognitive growth. During this time, children use their senses and actions to explore, discover, learn and grow. This period begins with basic reflexes and advances through a series of “stages” to complex sensory and motor skills, and early symbolic thought. Physical development (mobility) allows the child to begin developing new intellectual abilities.

One of the most important discoveries about the developing mind is how early and significantly infants are uniting individual observations into coherent conceptual systems.

From very early on, children are not simply passive observers, registering the superficial appearance of things. Instead, they are building explanatory systems (implicit theories) that organize their knowledge. Such implicit theories contain causal principles and causal relations. These theories enable children to predict, explain, and reason about relevant phenomena and, in some cases, intervene to change them.

As early as the first year of life, babies develop implicit theories about how the world of people, other living things, objects, and numbers operate. Researchers have found that these foundational theories are not simply isolated forms of knowledge but play a profound role in children's everyday lives and subsequent learning.

Read more at CD-EXP-C03.