This intelligence nevertheless succeeds in eventually solving numerous problems of action (reaching hidden objects, reaching hidden objects …) by constructing a complex system of action-schemes (the structure/organisation of actions as they are transferred/generalised by repetition in similar/analogous circumstances) and organising reality in terms of spatio-temporal and casual structures. In the absence of language or symbolic function, however, these constructions are made with the sole support of perceptions and movements and thus by means of a sensori-motor coordination of actions, without the intervention of representation or thought.
1. Stimulus-Response and Assimilation
It is difficult to specify when sensori-motor intelligence appears. The question actually makes no sense as the answer always depends on an arbitrary choice of criterion. What actually happens is a remarkably smooth succession of stages, each marking a new advance, until the moment when the acquired behavior presents characteristics that one or another psychologist recognizes as those of "intelligence." There is a continuous progression from spontaneous movements and reflexes to acquired habits and from the latter to intelligence.
The real problem is not to locate the first appearance of intelligence but rather to understand the mechanism of this progression.
It can be argued that this mechanism consists in assimilation (comparable to biological assimilation in the broad sense): meaning that reality data are treated or modified in such a way as to become incorporated into the structure of the subject. In other words, every newly established connection is integrated into an existing schematism. According to this view, the organizing activity of the subject must be considered just as important as the connections inherent in the external stimuli, for the subject becomes aware of these connections only to the degree that he can assimilate them by means of his existing structures.
In other words, associationism conceives the relationship between stimulus and response in a unilateral manner: S → R; whereas the point of view of assimilation presupposes a reciprocity S←→R; that is to say, the input, the stimulus, is filtered through a structure that consists of the action-schemes (or, at a higher level, the operations of thought), which in turn are modified and enriched when the subject's behavioural repertoire is accommodated to the demands of reality. The filtering or modification of the input is called assimilation; the modification of internal schemes to fit reality is called accommodation.
2. Stage 1
On the one hand, it has been shown by the study of animal behaviour as well as by the study of the electrical activity of the nervous system that the organism is never passive, but presents spontaneous and global activities whose form is rhythmic
On the other hand, embryological analysis of the reflexes (G. E. Coghill and others) has enabled us to establish the fact that reflexes are formed by differentiation upon a groundwork of more global activi-ties. In the case of the locomotive reflexes of the batra-chains, for example, it is an overall rhythm which culminates in a succession of differentiated and coordinated reflexes, and not the reflexes which lead to that rhythm.
As far as the reflexes of the newborn child are concerned, those among them that are of particular importance for the future (the sucking reflex and the palmar reflex, which will be integrated into later intentional grasping) give rise to what has been called a "reflex exercise"; that is, a consolidation by means of functional exercise. This explains why after a few days the newborn child nurses with more assurance and finds the nipple more easily when it has slipped out of his mouth than at the time of his first attempts.* The reproductive or functional assimilation that accounts for this exercise also gives rise to a generalising assimilation (sucking on nothing between meals or sucking new objects) and a recognitive assimilation (distinguishing the nipple from other objects).
*Similar reflex exercises are observed in animals too, as in the groping that characterizes the first efforts at copulation in Lymneae.
3. Stage 2
A conditioned reflex is never stabilized by the force of its associations alone, but only by the formation of a scheme of assimilation: that is, when the result attained satisfies the need inherent in the assimilation in question (as with Pavlov's dog, which salivates at the sound of the bell as long as this sound is identified with a signal for food, but which ceases to salivate if food no longer follows the signal).
4. Stage 3
Thus after the reflex stage (Stage 1) and the stage of the first habits (Stage 2), a third stage (Stage 3) introduces the next transitions after the beginning of coordination between vision and pre-hension.
The baby starts grasping and manipulating everything he sees in his immediate vicinity. For example, a subject of this age catches hold of a cord hanging from the top of his cradle, which has the effect of shaking all the rattles suspended above him.
Each time the interesting result motivates the repetition. This constitutes a "circular reaction" in the sense of J. M. Baldwin, or a new habit in the nascent state, where the result to be obtained is not differentiated from the means employed.
Later you need only hang a new toy from the top of the cradle for the child to look for the cord, which constitutes the beginning of a differentiation between means and end.
Although the child's actions seem to reflect a sort of magical belief in causality without any material connection, his use of the same means to try to achieve different ends indicates that he is on the threshold of intelligence.
5. Stages 4 and 5
In a fourth stage (Stage 4), we observe more complete acts of practical intelligence. The subject sets out to ob tain a certain result, independent of the means he is going to employ: for example, obtaining an object that is out of reach or has just disappeared under a piece of cloth or a cushion.
In the course of this fourth stage, the coordination of means and ends is new and is invented differently in each unforeseen situation (otherwise we would not speak of intelligence), but the means employed are derived only from known schemes of assimila-tion.
In the course of a fifth stage (Stage 5), which makes its appearance around eleven or twelve months, a new ingredient is added to the foregoing behavior: the search for new means by differentiation from schemes already known.
An example of this is what we call the "behavior pattern of the support." An object has been placed on a rug out of the child's reach. The child, after trying in vain to reach the object directly, may eventually grasp one corner of the rug (by chance or as a substitute), and then, observing a relationship between the movements of the rug and those of the object, gradually comes to pull the rug in order to reach the object.
6. Stage 6
Finally, a sixth stage marks the end of the sensori-motor period and the transition to the following period. In this stage the child becomes capable of finding new means not only by external or physical groping but also by internalized combinations that culminate in sudden comprehension or insight. For example, a child confronted by a slightly open matchbox containing a thimble first tries to open the box by physical groping (reaction of the fifth stage), but upon failing, he presents an altogether new reaction: he stops the action and attentively examines the situation (in the course of this he slowly opens and closes his mouth, or, as another subject did, his hand, as if in imitation of the result to be attained, that is, the enlargement of the opening), after which he suddenly slips his finger into the crack and thus succeeds in opening the box.
…None of these categories is given at the outset, and the child's initial universe is entirely centered on his own body and action in an egocentrism as total as it is unconscious (for lack of consciousness of the self). In the course of the first eighteen months, however, there occurs a kind of Copernican revolution, or, more simply, a kind of general decentering process whereby the child eventually comes to regard himself as an object among others in a universe that is made up of permanent objects (that is, structured in a spatio-temporal manner) and in which there is at work a causality that is both localized in space and objectified in things.
1. The Permanent Object
The universe of the young baby is a world without objects, consisting only of shifting and unsubstantial "tableaux" which appear and are then totally reabsorbed, either without returning, or reappearing in a modified or analogous form. At about five to seven months (Stage 3 of Infancy), when the child is about to seize an object and you cover it with a cloth or move it behind a screen, the child simply withdraws his already extended hand or, in the case of an object of special interest (his bottle, for example), begins to cry or scream with disap-pointment. He reacts, therefore, as if the object had been reabsorbed.
^ H. Gruber has made a study of the same problem in kittens. Kittens pass through approximately the same stages but reach a beginning of permanence as early as three months. The human infant, on this point as on many others, is backward in comparison to the young animal, but this backwardness bears witness to more complex assimilations, since later the human infant is able to go far beyond the animal.
2. Space and Time
3. Causality
In the observation of the cord hanging from the top of the cradle, the baby does not locate the cause of the movement of the dangling rattles in the connection between the cord and the rattles, but rather in the global action of "pulling the cord," which is quite another thing. The proof is that he continues to pull the cord in an attempt to act upon objects situated two yards away, or to act upon sounds, etc.
This early notion of causality may be called magical-phenomenalist: "phenomenalist" because the phenomenal contiguity of two events is sufficient to make them appear causally related, and "magical" because it is centered on the action of the subject without consideration of spatial connection between cause and effect.
However, as the universe is increasingly structured by the sensori-motor intelligence according to a spatio-tem-poral organization and by the formation of permanent ob-jects, causality becomes objectified and spatialized: that is, the subject becomes able to recognize not only the causes situated in his own actions but also in various ob jects, and the causal relationships between two objects or their actions presuppose a physical and spatial connection.
In the behavior patterns of the support, the string, and the stick (Stages 5 and 6), for example, it is clear that the movements of the rug, the string, or the stick are believed to influence those of the object (independently of the author of the displacement), provided there is contact. If the object is placed beside the rug and not on it, the child at Stage 5 will not pull the supporting object, whereas the child at Stage 3 or even 4 who has been trained to make use of the supporting object (or who has discovered its role by accident) will still pull the rug even if the object no longer maintains with it the spatial relationship "placed upon."
1. The Initial Adualism
The affects peculiar to the first two stages (Stages 1 and 2 of infancy) occur within a context already described by Baldwin under the name of "adualism," in which there does not yet exist any consciousness of the self; that is, any boundary between the internal or experienced world and the world of external realities. Freud talked about narcissism but did not sufficiently stress the fact that this was narcissism without a Narcissus. Anna Freud has since clarified the concept of "primary narcissism" as an initial lack of differentiation between the self and the other. H. Wallon describes this same undifferentiation in terms of symbiosis. Insofar as the self remains undifferentiated, and thus unconscious of itself, all affectivity is centered on the child's own body and action, since only with the dissociation of the self from the other or non-self does decentration, whether affective or cognitive, become possible. The root notion contained in the term "narcissism" is valid provided we make it clear that an unconscious centering due to undifferentiation is not at all like a conscious centering of one's emotional life upon the self which can occur in later life.
The affects observable in this adualistic period are at first dependent upon general rhythms corresponding to the rhythms of the spontaneous global activities of the organism; namely, alternations between states of tension and relaxation, etc. These rhythms are differentiated into a search for agreeable stimuli and a te
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