Sensory Development

Sensory development is the ability of the human organism to accept various kinds of information from the surroundings. Sensory processing also includes the nervous system and the way the child receives, organizes and understands information provided to them via sensory input. As a response the child may reply with a corresponding movement or behavior/reaction. Deficiencies in sensory functioning can lead to difficulties in executing everyday actions, learning, playing, social skills and behavior. Due to this fact it is of great importance to monitor childhood development in this specific region of functioning.

The sensory system develops rapidly in early childhood, when children get to know the world and are exposed to a variety of stimuli from the external environment. Even before their first year, children have a perception of depth, differentiate colors and a number of textures and sounds. Between their 12th and 19th month they develop a sensitivity for different tastes. Children continue developing their sensory system at a preschool age and acquire new skills which help them to read and write at school. Below, we have compiled a list of the key competences.

As a child registers, examines, experiments with and compares objects and phenomena around them, the child’s ideas of these objects and phenomena, their properties and functions are formed. In this way – by confirming previously acquired concepts and creating new ones – the child gains a personal experience of the world, and together with sensory stimuli this helps the child’s overall development. Vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste are senses which function as inputs for the processing of shapes, colors, smells, temperature, location, taste and other properties of the external world.

Perception is a cognitive process which examines the properties of objects and phenomena. The overall picture begins to take shape in the child’s mind as a kind of mental representation or idea of the external world. The ideas and thoughts collecting in the child’s mind will be used as the basis for the creation of concepts and fantasies, artistic expression and play. Sensory stimulation simultaneously arrives from one’s own body and creates the basis for awareness of the bodily structure and spatial orientation.

Sense and perception serve primary functions such as:

• Gaining knowledge – this way, sense and perception serve as a source of knowledge about the world, which provides the foundation for classifying them as cognitive. Through them the child orients themselves in their surroundings and gains access to information about a huge amount of properties that are presented to them in the form of sensory-perceptual circumstances.

• Functions supporting the sense of the reality of the outside world – reassuring themselves about the stability and predictability of the outside world through sensory-perceptual systems is a continuous process for the child. The sense of reality is often experienced as a background process but it is of great importance – this procedure induces stability of the intellectual and emotional relations in the child’s mind.

• Stimulatory requirements – this refers to a child’s need for sufficiently stimulating and varied sensory experiences. These stimuli improve the overall mental capacity of a child. A monotonous environment without a sufficient number of sensory stimuli may lead to “sensory deprivation”, leading to apathy, insufficient initiative and sometimes even overall developmental regression.

• Motivational functions – these are the motivational aspects of perception itself. Perception through the individual senses has an emotional impact. The affective (emotional) component never disappears completely from sensory perception and is responsible for pleasant or conversely unpleasant sensations. They find certain objects interesting, which may lead to a determination often observed in small children – they want to find out everything they can about the things they see and hear – they manipulate objects in multiple ways, experimenting and discovering their properties.

Sensory Functioning at Pre-school Age

Sensory development in this age group provides the basis for acquiring scholastic skills such as reading, writing, calculation and more. Furthermore, social skills are also supposed to begin to manifest in this period – communication with peers, cooperative play. In the following section we will describe the partial aspects of visual, auditory and touch perception which contribute to a child’s development.

Sight – includes perception of colors, shapes (regardless of size, colors or angle from which we see them), spatial relations, visual analysis and synthesis (ability to differentiate the parts from the whole – e.g. differentiating the letters of the alphabet that make up a word), visual supplementation (includes the ability to recognize a familiar, partially covered object), visual concepts (ability to build mental representations and pictures based on information, experience, examination), visual differentiation (the ability to distinguish details or the location of an object in space), following a visual/sight-oriented model that is repeated (following objects in a specific order). All these abilities take practice to develop and refine.
Hearing – four main features:
- noticing specific sound signals (or lack of specific signals),
- differentiation of auditory signals (distinguishing between two or more similar or different sounds, includes auditory analysis and synthesis),
- identification of audio signals (recognizing their content),
- comprehension (the highest level of auditory processing – the ability to understand and receive information transferred via hearing).
If one of these functions is missing, disrupted or insufficiently developed, it can lead to problems with social interactions as well as difficulties acquiring skills in school and understanding instructions.
Touch – through our skin we receive different stimuli from the outside (tactile perception). This is one of the manners of learning. It is very important that children of pre-school age experiment with different surfaces, forms and textures. In order to feel comfortable, a good order of introduction to tactile stimulation has to be followed.
It begins with dry textures – sand, beans, rice, wooden objects, grass, leaves and so on. This follows into “middle” textures (that are not dry but do not stick to the skin of the child either) – play dough, clay, boiled and cold macaroni.
The final type of textures are the so-called “messy” ones – they stick to the surface of the body – mud, shaving foam, pudding, finger colors.
With textures from all three types we can encourage different creative activities – painting, modelling with clay, naming the things every texture does or feels like and much more. An example of this can be how tactile perception aids the learning process when kids learn calculation with an abacus. It facilitates an understanding of mathematical principles through tactile learning and gaining knowledge.