What is the major difference between primary circular reactions and secondary circular reactions and Piagets sensorimotor stage?

The Developmental Progression of Play

Play develops with the child. It begins as inspection and manipulation and moves gradually to symbolism and pretense.

For the first 2–3 months of the child's life, objects in the environment are not very important for play purposes. According to Jean Piaget, during this time infants engage in “primary circular reactions”—activities repeated for their own sake. For example, infants may coo repeatedly or open and close their fingers repetitively, suck their thumbs, or blow bubbles; while lying awake, they may arch their backs and drop their bodies onto the mattress over and over again.

Around 4 months of age, infants develop skills to manipulate objects, but even then, they are more interested in the actions they can perform than in any object characteristics. Thus, babies may look at a toy in their field of vision, but when holding an object in their hands they bring it to their mouth rather than visually study it. Even when two objects appear related to one another—a cup and a spoon, for instance—the infant often still focuses on actions, banging the spoon in the cup rather than on the objects. Remove the spoon, and the infant is likely to continue the action.

A major change in complexity and quality of play occurs when infants approach the end of the first year. At about this time, infants engage in three different types of exploratory play: functional, relational, and functional–relational. When infants are involved in functional play, they play with toys in the way the toys were designed to be played with, like rolling a car on its wheels. In the course of relational play, infants bring together two unrelated toys (e.g., a car and a cup) with no signs of pretense. In functional–relational play, children bring two objects together and use them in the meaningful way (e.g., load a container with blocks).

Thus, first-year play is predominantly characterized by sensorimotor manipulation. In their play infants explore the environment around them, deriving information about objects: their properties, physical characteristics, functions, and effects. Because children's activities are tied to the physical properties of objects, rather than being representational, this type of play is called exploratory or nonsymbolic. In the course of development of exploratory play, infants first direct their actions and attention toward a single object and later incorporate several objects in their play. Initially these objects may be treated inappropriately with respect to function, and only later children learn to treat them appropriately. For example, during the first months children may mouth a cup, but when they get a little older they may bang a spoon and a cup. Only later with age does the child use a cup and spoon appropriately, by stirring the spoon inside the cup.

Until the second year of life there are few signs of pretense or symbolism in children's play. Pretense requires representational skills. Because representational skills only slowly emerge, pretend play does likewise. Additionally, object substitution emerges as a clear indicator of more advanced symbolic play. When the young child builds a tower out of blocks, the tower now means more to the child than the characteristics of the blocks themselves. This suggests that there are two distinct kinds of representations reflected in object substitutions: primary representations and metarepresentations. Primary representations reflect tangible properties of objects (their shape, color, substance). Thus, objects can be used for different purposes. Younger children tend to restrict object substitutions according to perceptual features, such as shape and color. The child can talk on the toy telephone, utilize a cloth as a toy blanket, or pretend a red ball is an apple. Older children are able to use metarepresentations—representations of objects in unusual ways, independent of their physical characteristics. Thus a banana can be a telephone, and blocks can be served as pastries.

When pretend play first emerges, children tend to engage into self-directed pretense, centering pretense on their own bodies and actions. Children may pretend to be asleep, to eat from toy tableware, to read a book, or to talk on a toy telephone. Older children “decenter” pretense by involving not only themselves but surrounding objects in pretend actions. They can make a doll read a book or make a set of buttons to go for a walk as if they were people. Even after the advent of decentration, play becomes more elaborate, when children combine sequences of pretend actions into a coherent scenario and make pretend plans for the future, such as hosting tea parties, cooking dinners, taking dolls to school, and going to work.

Thus, in the second year, children's play actions take on more of a nonliteral quality. The goal of play now appears to be symbolic or representational. Play becomes increasingly generative, as children enact activities performed by self, others, and objects in simple pretense scenarios, pretending to drive toy cars, eat from empty plates, or talk on toy telephones. Symbolic or pretend play also follows a sequence in development. At first symbolic play is self-directed, later it begins to include pretense schemes that apply to others. In the same way, single-scheme pretense appears before multischeme pretense. Finally, pretense with substitution objects develops.

This developmental progression of play is a generalized version of the sequential changes in representation that take place in early childhood. The majority of children follow this developmental pattern, although there are also wide individual differences in the rates of children achieving each level of development and in the quality of each level of achievement.

The Developmental Progression of Play

Play develops with the child. It begins as inspection and manipulation and moves gradually to symbolism and pretense.

For the first 2–3 months of the child’s life, objects in the environment are not very important for play purposes. According to Jean Piaget, during this time infants engage in ‘primary circular reactions’ – activities repeated for their own sake. For example, infants may coo repeatedly or open and close their fingers repetitively, suck their thumbs, or blow bubbles; while lying awake, they may arch their backs and drop their bodies onto the mattress over and over again.

Around 4 months of age, infants develop skills to manipulate objects, but even then, they are more interested in the actions they can perform than in any object characteristics. Thus, babies may look at a toy in their field of vision, but when holding an object in their hands they bring it to their mouth rather than visually study it. Even when two objects appear related to one another – a cup and a spoon, for instance – the infant often still focuses on actions, banging the spoon in the cup rather than on the objects. Remove the spoon, and the infant is likely to continue the action.

A major change in complexity and quality of play occurs when infants approach the end of the first year. At about this time, infants engage in three different types of exploratory play: functional, relational, and functional–relational. When infants are involved in functional play, they play with toys in the way the toys were designed to be played with, like rolling a car on its wheels. In the course of relational play, infants bring together two unrelated toys (e.g., a car and a cup) with no signs of pretense. In functional–relational play, children bring two objects together and use them in the meaningful way (e.g., load a container with blocks).

Thus, first-year play is predominantly characterized by sensorimotor manipulation. In their play infants explore the environment around them, deriving information about objects: their properties, physical characteristics, functions, and effects. Because children’s activities are tied to the physical properties of objects, rather than being representational, this type of play is called exploratory or nonsymbolic. In the course of development of exploratory play, infants first direct their actions and attention toward a single object and later incorporate several objects in their play. Initially these objects may be treated inappropriately with respect to function, and only later children learn to treat them appropriately. For example, during the first months children may mouth a cup, but when they get a little older they may bang a spoon and a cup. Only later with age does the child use a cup and spoon appropriately, by stirring the spoon inside the cup.

Until the second year of life there are few signs of pretense or symbolism in children’s play. Pretense requires representational skills. Because representational skills only slowly emerge, pretend play does likewise. Additionally, object substitution emerges as a clear indicator of more advanced symbolic play. When the young child builds a tower out of blocks, the tower now means more to the child than the characteristics of the blocks themselves. This suggests that there are two distinct kinds of representations reflected in object substitutions: primary representations and metarepresentations. Primary representations reflect tangible properties of objects (their shape, color, substance). Thus, objects can be used for different purposes. Younger children tend to restrict object substitutions according to perceptual features, such as shape and color. The child can talk on the toy telephone, utilize a cloth as a toy blanket, or pretend a red ball is an apple. Older children are able to use metarepresentations – representations of objects in unusual ways, independent of their physical characteristics. Thus a banana can be a telephone, and blocks can be served as pastries.

When pretend play first emerges, children tend to engage into self-directed pretense, centering pretense on their own bodies and actions. Children may pretend to be asleep, to eat from toy tableware, to read a book, or to talk on a toy telephone. Older children ‘decenter’ pretense by involving not only themselves but surrounding objects in pretend actions. They can make a doll read a book or make a set of buttons to go for a walk as if they were people. Even after the advent of decentration, play becomes more elaborate, when children combine sequences of pretend actions into a coherent scenario and make pretend plans for the future, such as hosting tea parties, cooking dinners, taking dolls to school, and going to work.

Thus, in the second year, children’s play actions take on more of a nonliteral quality. The goal of play now appears to be symbolic or representational. Play becomes increasingly generative, as children enact activities performed by self, others, and objects in simple pretense scenarios, pretending to drive toy cars, eat from empty plates, or talk on toy telephones. Symbolic or pretend play also follows a sequence in development. At first symbolic play is self-directed, later it begins to include pretense schemes that apply to others. In the same way, single-scheme pretense appears before multischeme pretense. Finally, pretense with substitution objects develops.

This developmental progression of play is a generalized version of the sequential changes in representation that take place in early childhood. The majority of children follow this developmental pattern, although there are also wide individual differences in the rates of children achieving each level of development and in the quality of each level of achievement.

Causality

Piaget observed an orderly sequence of changes in the child's understanding of causal relationships over the first 2 years of life. First, infants learn to recreate satisfying bodily sensations by maneuvers such as thumb sucking (primary circular reaction). At about 3 months of age, infants begin to use causal behaviors to recreate accidentally discovered, interesting effects (secondary circular reaction). Infants at this age repeatedly kick the mattress once they have discovered by chance that this behavior sets in motion a mobile above the bed. Infants' understanding of cause and effect gradually leads to increasingly specific behavior patterns aimed at particular environmental effects. During the second year of life, toddlers become experimenters, intent on causing novel events rather than reinstituting familiar ones (tertiary circular reactions). At the same time, children begin to comprehend that apparently unrelated behaviors can be combined to created a desired effect. By age 2 years, a child spontaneously winds up a toy to make it move.

DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

According to developmental theory, self-injury is a unique subset of behaviors emerging from the larger category of repetitive behaviors commonly observed in infancy.21 In this regard, repetitive behavior is seen as occurring during the normal progression of early developmental stages and reflective of the child's maturational process. Piaget22 viewed repetitive motor movements as reflecting the earliest stages of intellectual growth (i.e., sensorimotor period of development). For the infant, engaging in repetitive acts, or “circular reactions,” as Piaget termed them, emerges from an innate propensity for repetition, which allows infants to learn about their bodies. During the first year of life, the extent to which infants continue to engage in repetitive activity affects their ability to develop adaptive environment manipulation, which ultimately, helps them understand the world. Repetitive behavior would then decrease across the normal developmental trajectory as the child learns more adaptive and mature behavior, such as communication, to interact with the environment.

For children not progressing in accordance with the normal developmental trajectory, engaging in repetitive behavior was said to have become “fixated” at levels of primary and secondary circular reactions. Repetitive motor mannerisms directed toward the self were said to represent primary circular reactions, whereas repetitive motor mannerisms directed toward the environment were said to represent secondary circular reactions. Fixation, in this regard, was representative of not only a slower development but also a deceleration and termination of progress in the latter stages of the developmental period, in which continuing cognitive growth was anticipated. In sum, fixation was thought to occur when the course of normal development was disrupted as a result of inadequate learning experience, lack of appropriate stimuli, absence of critical role models, or physical and/or cognitive impairment.

Accordingly, self-injurious behavior is viewed as resulting from the stalling of an otherwise normal and transient stage of development. Repetitive self-injurious behavior has been observed in 5% of normally developing infants and toddlers before the age of 36 months,23 usually in the form of head banging in the crib and usually with the clear communicative intent to be picked up, fed, burped, changed, or comforted because of sickness. The advent of language in the normally developing child results in no further self-injury. For children with autism spectrum disorder and mental retardation who fail to acquire language, repetitive self-injurious behavior becomes stereotypic in nature because of a “fixed primary circular reaction” based in earlier learning, in which it proved to be an efficacious means of communicating protest and discomfort and/or gaining access to care and comforting measures. It may be argued that this same line of reasoning, which overlaps extensively with the positive and negative reinforcement hypotheses of learning theory, may be applied to adolescents with impulsive self-injurious behavior and borderline personality disorder, in which a constant demand for attention is characteristic of the disorder, or those with affective disorder, in which the need to communicate distress and access safety and comforting measures may be paramount.

Four Views of Self/Environment Differentiation

The two major developmental theories of this century, Freud’ s and Piaget’ s, both incorporate an assumption that normal development in humans requires an initial investment in the task of differentiating the self from its external environment. Both frame the task in terms of its relevance to the infant’s acquiring a capacity to act instrumentally on the environment. However, as we will see below, the theories differ as to when and how the task is accomplished. Freud proposed a relatively quick accomplishment within the first few months, while Piaget proposed the task would take two or three times as long (Wolff, 1960). As for how the distinction between self and nonself is accomplished, the two theories differ greatly. A third, nondevelopmental, view has been offered by connectionist theorists (Hinton & Sejnowski, 1986). I will argue here, as I have elsewhere (Watson, 1994), that each of these three classic views fails to provide a truly workable means for dissociating self and environment. Yet, as we will see, they help illuminate a more likely possibility as provided in the hypothesis of contingency perception.