PART I
PLAYFUL EXPERIMENTATION
I. Playful Activity of the Sensory Apparatus
1. Sensations of Contact
The newborn infant is susceptible to touch sensations. Movements and loud cries can be induced directly after it has for the first time become quiet, by pinching the skin or slapping the thigh.[9] Experiments with the hands and mouth are most satisfactory, as these organs are extremely sensitive from the first. During its first week the child makes many purely automatic motions with its hands, and frequently touches its face. When contact is had in this way with the lips, they react with gentle sucking movements, and later follows the playful sucking of the fingers so common among children. It is, of course, difficult to say when such movements are conscious or when they are the result of taste stimuli.[10] According to Perez, a two-months-old babe enjoys being stroked softly, and from that moment it is possible that it may seek, by its own movements, to provide touch stimuli for itself. Here play begins. “Touch now controls. At three months the child begins to reach out for the purpose of grasping with his hand; he handles like an amateur connoisseur, and the tendency to seek and to test muscular sensations develops in him from day to day.”[11]
a. We will first notice grasping with the hand as it is connected with taste stimuli. The merely instinctive movements of the first few days are multiplied and fixed, by means of inherited adaptation, progressively from the beginning of the second quarter year. The child begins by handling every object which comes within his reach, even his own body, and especially his feet, and one hand with the other.[12] In all this not only the motor element, of which we will speak later, but also the sensor stimulus becomes an object of interest, as Preyer’s observation shows. “In the eighteenth week, whenever the effort to grasp was unsuccessful its fingers were attentively regarded. Evidently the child expected the sensation of contact, and when it was not forthcoming wondered at the absence of the feeling.”[13] This practice in grasping promotes the opposition of the thumb, which first appears toward the end of the first quarter, and from that time the refinement of the sense of contact progresses rapidly. At eight months Strümpell’s little daughter took great pleasure in picking up very small objects, like bread crumbs or pearls.[14] This illustrates the familiar fact that play leads up from what is easy to more difficult tasks, since only deliberate conquest can produce the feeling of pleasure in success. At about this time, too, the child’s explorations of its own body are extended, and their conclusions confirmed by the recognition of constant local signs. “As soon as she discovered her ear,” says Strümpell of his now ten-months-old daughter, “she seized upon it as if she wished to tear it off.” In her third year Marie G—— found on the back of her ear two little projections of cartilage, which she examined with the greatest interest, calling them balls, and wanting everybody to feel them. The nose, too, is repeatedly investigated. Although it is seldom large enough to be grasped, still, as Stanley Hall says, it is handled with unmistakable signs of curiosity, and often pulled or rubbed “in an investigating way.”[15]
The value of the sense of touch for the earliest mental development is testified to by the fact that the child, like doubting Thomas, trusts more to it than to his sight. Sikorski says: “At tea I turn to my eleven-months baby, point to the cracker jar, which she knows, and ask her to give me one. I open the empty jar and the child looks in, but, not satisfied with that, sticks her hand in and explores. The evidence of her eyes does not convince her of the absence of what she wants.”[16]