Sensorimotor learning: we learn to see by moving

It is a wet August afternoon. The cotton durrie still smells of the morning’s mopping, and in the kitchen a pressure cooker whistles. A baby of nine months, who found out only last week that she can crawl, drags herself towards a steel tumbler near the door, palms slapping on the cool floor. At the doorway there is a step down into the verandah, not much higher than her own hand. She stops. She pats the edge, leans over and rocks back on her knees. A few weeks ago, carried on someone’s hip, that step was simply part of the floor. Now it is a drop.

Seeing is something a body does

We tend to think of the eye as a camera that hands the brain a picture to act on. Sensorimotor learning turns this order around. It says we learn to perceive the world by moving through it, and that what we see is shaped by what our bodies have learned they can do. The psychologist Kevin O’Regan and the philosopher Alva Noë put it plainly. Seeing, they wrote, is “a way of acting”. The idea belongs with enaction, the view that knowing is a form of doing.

Long before them, Jean Piaget called the first two years of life the sensorimotor period, a time when the infant’s intelligence lives in grasping, banging, kicking and throwing, well before it can live in words. The baby at the doorstep is not waiting for her mind to grow before she understands the step. Her understanding is growing in her knees.

Two kittens on a carousel

In 1963 the researchers Held and Hein kept ten pairs of kittens in darkness except for three hours a day in a circular apparatus. One kitten in each pair walked and turned the apparatus. Its partner rode in a basket along the same path, unable to move itself. Only one acted. The walkers learned to put out their paws when lowered towards a surface, to blink at an approaching object and to avoid the deep side of a visual cliff. The riders did not.

Human babies tell a similar story. Campos, Bertenthal and Kermoian found that wariness of heights, long assumed to arrive with age, tracked how much a baby had been crawling rather than how old she was. Two decades later, Dahl, Campos and their colleagues let babies who could not yet crawl drive a small powered go-cart. Afterwards their heart rates rose at a drop-off, and untrained babies’ did not. Infants, the researchers said, “do not follow a maturational script”.

Not every finding here is as solid. Amy Needham and her colleagues found in 2002 that three-month-olds given Velcro “sticky mittens”, which let them pick up toys before they could grasp, explored objects more. A pre-registered study in Sweden in 2022 found the same training did no more for reaching and grasping than watching or no training. The broad principle, that self-made movement shapes perception, stands on strong ground. Quick tricks to speed it up do not. Kittens are not children, and most of this evidence comes from infancy.

What this changes about a child

Take this seriously and the child who touches everything looks different. At the vegetable market she presses the tomatoes, rolls a lemon in her palm, and someone tells her to look with her eyes and not her hands. Yet her hands are part of how her eyes learn. Through the sense of their own limbs and countless small trials, children learn what a ledge or a slope invites them to do, and that knowledge becomes part of what they see.

Our schools mostly ask for the opposite. Hands on the desk, eyes on the board, for hours of sitting at a stretch. We read the still child as the attentive child, even though stillness is not the same as attention.

Not a trick for better marks

The usual case for movement in school says that children who stretch will concentrate better. It treats the body as a battery, recharged so that the real learning, somewhere behind the eyes, can carry on. Sensorimotor research points deeper. It suggests that perception is built from movement, and the seeing child and the moving child are one child. Here the evidence runs out and the argument begins, because nobody has tested a nine-year-old on a carousel. What the research does is take away the comfortable picture of a child as a pair of eyes attached to a brain that must be kept still. If that picture is wrong, movement is not a reward after learning or a break from it. It is part of what learning is made of.

Think again of the baby at the doorstep. Nobody taught her that the step was a drop. She found it out with her knees. Years later she will sit on a bench, be shown a picture of a cliff and be asked to write the word “steep”. Which of those two lessons will she know more deeply, and what does it say about us that our schools give most of their hours to the second?

Put it into practice: P27 Mapping the school with your feet · P33 Shapes on the ground: geometry you can walk · P42 Watching closely: observation as a practice

Read next: R8 Proprioception: the forgotten sense of learning · R35 Piaget: intelligence begins in movement

Notes

1. O’Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939–1031.
2. “Sensorimotor stage.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. On Jean Piaget’s first developmental period, from birth to about two years.
3. Held, R., & Hein, A. (1963). Movement-produced stimulation in the development of visually guided behavior. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 56(5), 872–876.
4. Campos, J. J., Bertenthal, B. I., & Kermoian, R. (1992). Early experience and emotional development: The emergence of wariness of heights. Psychological Science, 3(1), 61–64.
5. Dahl, A., Campos, J. J., Anderson, D. I., Uchiyama, I., Witherington, D. C., Ueno, M., Poutrain-Lejeune, L., & Barbu-Roth, M. (2013). The epigenesis of wariness of heights. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1361–1367.
6. Needham, A., Barrett, T., & Peterman, K. (2002). A pick-me-up for infants’ exploratory skills: Early simulated experiences reaching for objects using “sticky mittens” enhances young infants’ object exploration skills. Infant Behavior and Development, 25, 279–295.
7. van den Berg, L., Libertus, K., Nyström, P., Gottwald, J. M., Licht, V., & Gredebäck, G. (2022). A pre-registered sticky mittens study: Active training does not increase reaching and grasping in a Swedish context. Child Development, 93, e656–e671.

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