How do infants primarily interact with the world in the sensorimotor stage?

During the sensorimotor stage, which spans from birth to approximately 2 years of age, infants primarily interact with the world through their senses and physical actions. This stage is characterized by the exploration of their environment through looking, touching, sucking, and grasping. Infants learn about their surroundings by directly experiencing them using their sensory modalities, such as sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, and through their motor activities.

Senses and manual actions not only help infants to understand properties of objects—such as texture, shape, size, and weight—but also allow them to develop cognitive skills as they begin to make associations between actions and outcomes. For example, when an infant shakes a rattle, they can see that it makes noise, which reinforces their understanding of cause and effect.

In contrast, communication and social interactions along with structured learning and group play would become more prominent in later stages of development, as children grow and acquire language skills, social games, and more complex cognitive processes.