The development of object concept.

Abstract

(create) To understand how the budding intelligence constructs the external world, we must first ask whether the child, in its first months of life, conceives and perceives things as we do, as objects that have substance, that are permanent and of constant dimensions. If this is not the case, it is then necessary to explain how the idea of an object (object concept) is built up. The problem is closely connected with that of space. In this first chapter, then, substance and space should be considered simultaneously, and it is only through abstraction that we shall limit ourselves to object concept. Observation and experimentation combined seem to show that object concept, far from being innate or given ready-made in experience, is constructed little by little. Six stages can be discerned, corresponding to those of intellectual development in general. During the first two stages (those of reflexes and the earliest habits), the infantile universe is formed of pictures that can be recognized but that have no substantial permanence or spatial organization. During the third stage (secondary circular reactions), a beginning of permanence is conferred on things by prolongation of the movements of accommodation (grasping, etc.) but no systematic search for absent objects is yet observable. During the fourth stage ("application of known means to new situations") there is searching for objects that have disappeared but no regard for their displacements. During a fifth stage (about 12 to 18 months old) the object is constituted to the extent that it is permanent individual substance and inserted in the groups of displacements, but the child still cannot take account of changes of position brought about outside the field of direct perception. In a sixth stage (beginning at the age of 16 to 18 months) there is an image of absent objects and their displacements. This chapter extensively examines these six stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)