Psychology : $b A study of mental lifeWoodworth, Robert Sessions
Science
Psychology : $b A study of mental life
Woodworth, Robert Sessions
Psychology
During the first year or so of the child's life, his playful activity
takes shape in several ways. First, out of the great variety of the
random movements certain ones are picked out and fixed. This is the
way with putting the hand into the mouth or drumming on the floor with
the heels, and these instances illustrate the important fact that many
learned acts develop out of the child's random activity. Without play
activity there would be little work or accomplishment of the
distinctively human type. Second, certain specific movements, those of
locomotion and vocalization, appear with the ripening of the child's
native equipment, and take an important place in his play. Third, his
play comes to consist more and more of responses to external objects,
instead of to internal stimuli as at first. The playful responses to
external objects fall into two classes, according as they manipulate
objects or simply examine them.
We have, then, a small group of instincts that is very closely related
to the fundamental instinct of random activity.
Locomotion.
Evidence has already been presented [Footnote: See p. 95.] indicating
that walking is instinctive and not learned, so that the human species
is no exception to the rule that every species has its instinctive
mode of locomotion. Simpler performances which enter into the very
complex movement of walking make their appearance separately in the
infant before being combined into walking proper. Holding up the head,
sitting up, kicking with an alternate motion of the {153} two legs,
and creeping, ordinarily precede walking and lead up to it.
What is the natural stimulus to locomotion? It is as difficult to say
as it is to specify the stimulus in other forms of playful activity.
From the fact that blind children are usually delayed in beginning to
walk, we judge that the sense of sight furnishes some of the most
effective stimuli to this response. Often the impulse attending
locomotion is the impulse to approach some seen object, but probably
some satisfaction is derived simply from the free movement itself.
There certainly is no special emotion going with locomotion.
Locomotion has, of course, plenty of "survival value", and might have
been included among the organic instincts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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