PSY 431 students: In addition to the instructions about how to do the observation paper that I already posted on iLearn, here I’m also providing a sample of a good paper from a previous class. This is based on a different, and older infant, than the one on youtube that you are observing, but it shows you what your observation paper should look like. Notice how well this student clearly related each infant behavior to some aspect of Piaget’s account of the sensorimotor period: He stated which substage of the sensorimotor period the child probably is in, and tied the notions of assimilation and accommodation to specific infant behaviors.

Observation Paper #1 A couple (husband and wife) were sitting on the grass at a music festival with a young male infant, who was probably between 12-18 months old. He sat on his mother's lap with a group of the adult's friends around them. They were sitting together on a blanket with a clearing in the middle for the child to play and move around while they all enjoyed the music and talked to each other. As I was sitting there, I observed the infant's mother hand him a small box of wheat thins which he easily grasped in his hands and held, looking at it for a little while. Then he dropped the box which hit his mother's foot and rustled to the ground. His mother picked the box back up for him and put it back into his hands. He then dropped it again on her foot and it landed again on the ground next to them.
According to Piaget the child is in substage 5 of the sensorimotor period. The child is testing the cause and effect of his dropping the box of wheat thins on his mother's foot next to him. He is causing the box to fall, and then watching and studying it as it bounces off her foot and finally rests on the ground (causing a rustling noise from the crackers). Piaget would also think that he is experimenting with varying actions to see how it would cause a new outcome and then repeating the process to study if it yields the same result. He is using new techniques to form whole new concIusions about the world he interacts with.
Next, the father picked up the baby and held him close to his face talking to him. "Will you feed me a cracker?" the man kept repeating melodically using infant-directed talk. He would then hand the young child a cracker (the wheat thins I mentioned earlier). The child looked at the wheat thin, then at his father's mouth which was wide open and smiling and brought the cracker close to his father's mouth only to drop it and watch it flutter about 6 feet to the ground. The father laughed causing the baby to giggle and handed the baby another cracker repeating the same melodic command. The baby, although interested in the new cracker in his hand, continued to look back and forth between his father and the fallen cracker as if he was thinking, "why didn't he pick it up?" but quickly got distracted by his father's voice and repeated the process of bringing it close to his mouth and then dropping it. According to Piaget the child is both testing the reaction of the cracker falling, this time from a much greater height off the ground and also the social implications of him doing so. When he dropped the cracker his father laughed causing him to laugh, but his father didn't pick up the cracker (because it landed in the dirt which the infant wouldn't understand yet) which caused the infant to question why his father wouldn't pick up the cracker for him like his mother did earlier with the box. The child has at this point done a similar experiment to the one before but has seen a much different outcome.

This also shows both accommodation and assimilation for the infant. At first, he assimilated the information of dropping the box onto the blanket into a concept that he already understood. If he drops the box it lands on the ground, in a place relative to how he dropped it. Next, his mother picks up the box and puts it back into his hand. In the second set of experiments with his father he goes through a process of accommodation when he realizes that just because he drops it doesn't mean it will be picked back up for him and he adapts his current knowledge to conclude that only sometimes will the object be picked up when dropped. Through Piaget’s theory we can see that the child has now become an active scientist in the world around him and is testing what would happen both physically and socially when he does a certain action.