The developmental acquisition of motion

• Samuel Juni

  New York University

• Scott Budge

  New York University

Under the general rubric of the development of object constancy and permanence, a hierarchy of steps is outlined, corresponding to the assimilation of the concepts of time, space, motion, and non-centrist motion. The continuum, which is developmental in nature, is seen as beginning at the pervasive ego-centric position of early infancy where there is no concept of the outside world, and ending at the stage where the world is seen as the frame of reference for all subjectively perceived events. This dynamic antithesis is thus defined in terms of egocentricity polarities. The general impetus for movement along this continuum (with allowance for periodic regression) is formulated as a basic tendency to generalize from unitary experience into generalized expectancies. This tendency becomes manifest as integration algorithms which are expressed through the establishment of induction as a governing principle of phenomenological expectancies. This inductive system then forms the essence of a systematic explanatory network which basically is comprised of an internalized catalog of events the person had encountered in the past. Such historical antecedents had served to extract certain contingencies from the heretofore unexplained or “magical” domain of childhood logic and enable their codification as explainable (or expected) events. It is suggested that this road from magic to explanation is precisely the opposite of a parallel process which proceeds from total noncentricity to phenomenology of subjectivity - the philosophical inquiry into the logic events.

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