Week 3 - "Understanding the self, understanding the world"

This week, I noticed this connection between how a child develops, and how they understand the world. In Piaget's 'sensorimotor' stage of development, at 8 months old, infants gain deliberate, intentional behavior: "Means" and "end" become distinct things, and they can take action to achieve their goal. When a child starts to build theories about the world they live in, their 'naïve biology' classifies living things (in part) by the ability to have goals and take action to achieve them. It's interesting to me, this reflection of a child's sense of self onto their sense of the world. And it connects to egocentrism, in that they apply their own experience onto others, but it also breaks from egocentrism in that they perceive goals other than their own.

This connects to how a child builds up their conceptual framework of the world. The assimilation/accommodation process takes information that either fits neatly in existing schemes or pushes the slight expansion of those schemes. Either way, a child internalizes a small piece of the outside world into their understanding of it. When the world presents something that doesn't fit at all, or when there is constant accommodation with little assimilation, a framework is discarded; a new one is constructed on the bones of the old (the process Piaget calls 'equilibration') leading to a new period of development.

Throughout development, there is a flow of information between image of self and image of the world.