Any of the five avenues by which someone receives information: seeing (visual), hearing (auditory), touching (tactile), smelling (olfactory), and-tasting (gustatory), plus the sense of the body’s motion (kinesthetic, sometimes called haptic). According to Piaget’s theory, the first stage of a child’s cognitive development is the sensory- motor (or sensorimotor) stage, during which children gain an awareness of their sense perceptions and use this knowledge in developing motor skills.