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Child Development & Early Education vocabulary · Developmental Stages and Milestones

Sensorimotor stage

Meaning in child development & early education, with examples

nounCommon term

In child development & early education, sensorimotor stage means: The first of Piaget's four stages of cognitive development, from birth to about two years, when babies learn about the world through their senses and movements.

In Turkish: duyusal-motor dönem, duyu-motor dönem

How it is used

Appears in almost every child development course and exam. The later stages are the preoperational (about 2-7), concrete operational (about 7-11) and formal operational (from about 11) stages. Object permanence is its key achievement.

Example sentences

  1. In the sensorimotor stage, babies explore objects by mouthing, shaking and dropping them.

  2. Piaget divided the sensorimotor stage into six substages.

Common collocations

  • Piaget's stages
  • preoperational stage
  • concrete operational stage
  • formal operational stage
  • object permanenceA baby's understanding that people and things still exist when they cannot be seen, heard or touched.
  • egocentrismIn Piaget's theory, a young child's difficulty in seeing a situation from another person's point of view; it is a normal feature of thinking, not selfishness.
  • cognitive developmentThe development of thinking skills such as attention, memory, problem-solving, reasoning and understanding how the world works.
  • schemaA repeated pattern of play that children use to explore an idea, such as carrying, wrapping or throwing things; in Piaget's theory, a mental structure that organises knowledge.

More terms: Developmental Stages and Milestones

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