Implications And Applications Of Piaget's Sensorimotor Concepts

Implications and applications of Piaget's sensorimotor concepts 1 J. Churcher Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, MANCHESTER M13 9PL U.K. 1. Adaptation, assimilation and accommodation. For Piaget, the only invariants are functional ones: the same function is served by a variety of structures in different places at different times. In biology, the function of circulation, forexample, is served by different but in some sense analogous structures in different organisms, or in the same organism at different moments of its development. And within this conception of biology, it is only the functional identity between morphologically diverse structures that gives you any principle of functional classification of organs. The two most general functional invariants are adaptationand organisation. Piaget defines adaptation as a "progressive equilibrium between two component processes, assimilation and accommodation" (Piaget, 1953 (1936), p.6). These two processes constitute the relationship between an organism (or a scheme or a structure) and its environment. The organism is regarded as a closed cycle of state transformations: a → b, b → c, c → ... → a ... To each state,there corresponds - in some sense of corresponds - a certain state or element of the environment whose occurrence or presence is necessary for the transformation to the next state of organism, thus: a + x → b, b + y → c, c + z → ... → a, ... State a combines, in some sense, with x to give b, b combines with y to give c, and so on (where x, y, z, ... are the elements in the environment, correspondingto a, b, c, ..., the successive states of the organism). Assimilation is simply whatever is denoted by those plus signs; the continual and repeated incorporation of the environment into the cycle of state transformations. And what Piaget calls a scheme is just the cycle itself, considered as a finite, abstract entity rather than as the indefinitely long sequence of repeated transformations which,in a sense, it generates; it's an abstract object, like a grammar is. But pure assimilation can't occur, or at least it can't last, because the environment is always changing. What happens if element of the environment x fails to occur and is replaced by x' ? Either the cycle grinds to a halt (death in the case of an organism, or the action just stops in the case of a scheme), or some other wayto complete it must be
1

Paper given at the Advanced Research Institute on Adaptive Control of Ill-Defined Systems, Moretonhampstead, 21-26 June 1981.

1

found. And if some other way is found, then a + x' will result in some other state b' which like b is capable of combining with y to form c. The transformation or substitution of b into b' is what Piaget calls accommodation. So thescheme only exists by constantly and repeatedly assimilating elements of the environment; it can only assimilate in a constantly changing environment by repeatedly accommodating to it; and in accommodating, the scheme is transformed. Obvious examples of assimilation are the biochemical processes involved in digestion and metabolism, which continually reproduce an organism capable of digesting andmetabolising. But Piaget intends the concept to have a much more general application. 2. Sensorimotor schemes and reciprocal assimilation The inclusion of a new particular under some concept, i.e. a judgement, is an example of assimilation at the level of operational thought, whereas sensorimotor assimilation is a function of sensorimotor schemes, i.e. cycles of muscular activation and of physicalmovements of the body, with sensory feedback (for example, grasping an object or sucking). Such sensorimotor schemes, which first appear in the infant as the rhythmicalcyclic functioning of a reflex organisation, are forced to accommodate by material properties of the objects they encounter. (As I shall argue, they accommodate to much more than that, and that's the interesting point, but they are at...