An Open-Ended Approach to Piagetian Development of Adaptive Behavior

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in the open-ended development of adaptive behavior by infant humans in the context of embodied, enactive cognitive science.We focus on the sensorimotor development of an infant child from gestation to toddler and discuss what aspects of the body, brain, and environment could allow for the sort of leaps of complexity observed in the developing infant that has heretofore not been replicable by artificial means.We use the backdrops of Piagetian developmental principles and Sensorimotor Contingency Theory to discuss this process in terms of skill proficiency, and discuss biologically plausible means for achieving it by referring to predictive processing and the free energy principle.We also refer to the theory of affordances to examine the selection of appropriate behaviors in a complex environment, and investigate phenomenological accounts to discuss the intentionality inherent in the purposeful behaviors that develop.Throughout this paper we develop a functional account of infant development which is based on the aforementioned theories and which leads to a biologically realistic explanation for the theory laid out by Piaget consistent with the embodied and enactive views.