Definition
During the first year of life, much of children’s playtime involves, mainly, the exploration of the world through the repetition of already assimilated sensory and motor activities, for the sheer pleasure of doing so.
Introduction
Child development is such a diverse and complex subject; no single theory sufficiently meets all of it. The most common theories focus primarily on cognitive development or on social development. Providing a good theoretical ground of development in either of these theoretical fields is an endless challenge, as each of them accounts for an enormous range of topics. Cognitive development entails the growth of various capabilities such as perception, language, attention, reasoning, conceptual understanding, problem-solving, and intelligence (Siegler et al. 2011). This chapter focuses on cognitive development and more specifically during the sensorimotor period,...
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Christodoulou, N., Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous, X. (2018). Sensorimotor Play. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1071-1
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