Piaget then broke adaptation down into two processes: assimilation and accommodation. The first, assimilation, is the processes by which we incorporate ideas, people, customs, manners, and all sorts of other things into our own activities. For example, the young child who desires to bring a Bible to church. Why? Because he has observed mommy and daddy doing this and he has assimilated this custom into his life.

Accommodation is the balance to assimilation, that is, the adjusting of how we reach out to our environment. The young child who learns to raise his hands in praise can be said to have accommodated to his environment or context by learning the behavior of the people around him. He may not under-stand why hands are raised in praise - hopefully that will come later - rather he is simply seeking to fit in with those around him. Clearly, there is some overlap between assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation is something both animals and humans do. For example, as the deer population in certain areas of America has increased and the area in which they live has decreased, deer have had to accommodate their behavior by grazing along highways in full view of passing cars. Further, they have learned to assimilate new kinds of food as their normal feeding areas have been drastically reduced or disappeared.

Similarly, Piaget observed that humans learn to accommo-date and assimilate to their environment. Babies learn to put new things into their mouths as their parents teach them to eat solid food. But they also must learn that not everything they find should go into their mouths. Therefore, as the baby functions adaptively to her environment, she also develops cognitively as she slowly establishes categories of things that do go into her mouth and things that do not go into her mouth.

In his many hours of observing children, Piaget saw that they continue to reach out actively and explore their environ-ment. In fact, one can almost watch them learn as they explore their world and organize it cognitively into meaningful systems. At the same time, they adapt their behavior to what they are learning, always trying to maintain a balance between what they are learning and how they behave.

The regulatory dynamic between assimilation and accomo-dation is "equilibration." The human mind seeks to understand, to keep ideas in balance; so young children find simple ways to explain their world, offering childish explanations for what they experience. But as their world grows and their ability to understand develops, children seek better, more adequate levels of equilibration. The explanations we found satisfying in childhood fail to satisfy our sophisticated minds as adults, so the force of seeking equilibration stimulates the mind to higher levels of reasoning.

Piaget believed that there are three factors that stimulate cognitive development: maturation, experience, and social transmission. In his summarization of these three factors, Perry Downs defines these three factors in this way:

Maturation is more than a biological force; it is also cognitive. Just as the body matures, so the mind matures, developing new capacities for thinking and rea-soning. Children exercise growing muscles, strengthening them through use. Likewise, they must use their minds to strengthen them at each level of development. But the mind is more than a muscle to be strengthened; it is a developing aspect of the human personality, growing in predictable ways.

Experience also prompts cognitive development by providing sensory input for children. Active involvement with their environment allows children to gain information necessary for later cognitive development. Experience of direct sensory involvement with the environment is what Piaget had in mind - not a sterile sort of "academic" involvement, but a direct touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing sort of involvement. Because of this need, Piaget believed that "play is the work of the child." It is through playing that the child is able to gain this type of experience.

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