Piaget's (1953, 1955) increasingly controversial claim that infant knowledge depends upon action need not be rejected, provided the mechanisms underlying infant ability are conceptualized appropriately in computational terms. Computational concepts solve many problems caused by Piaget's notions of perception, behaviour, schemes, reciprocal-assimilation and action. Artificial intelligence work on vision offers a way of explaining early perceptual abilities that is precise, internally coherent and able to encompass recent findings of innate organization. Concepts from the procedural programming languages offer a way of accounting for both internal and overt aspects of behaviour, and for the functional coordination of perception and behaviour that characterizes infant anion. This perspective challenges Piaget's view that development necessitates a radical reconstruction of action-based knowledge. Conceptualized computationally, perceptual-behavioural action can be seen to involve representation in a nontrivial sense. Restructuring of action mechanisms can account for some central phenomena of infant development.
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