Beyond Principles and Programs: An Action Framework for Modeling Development

Action-based approaches provide a powerful alternative to the foundationalist assumption common to both nativist and empiricist frameworks. Only an action-based framework is able to account for the emergence of representation from a base that is not itself already representational. Accordingly, an action-based approach to representation in general and object representation in particular has implications for understanding persistence. In convergence with Piagetian theory, the interactivist model outlined above suggests that object persistence is itself a developmental phenomenon that involves increasing representational complexity over the first 2 years of an infants life.