Abstract
This review primarily is addressed to research published in the English language on Piaget’s notions of the object concept. The infant’s achievement of the concept of the object can be viewed as the cardinal achievement of the sensorimotor period. To have the idea that the world is populated with enduring, independent objects, including persons and events, implies that the infant has a scheme of cause, space, and time within a coherent framework. Further, Piaget has argued that the conceptions of cause, space, and time develop consistently with an invariant reference point, which is nothing else but the concept of the object. As we shall discuss below, Piaget’s theory of what is object awareness and how it is achieved contrasts strongly with empiricistic views. The infant does not become increasingly aware of the nature of objects through repeated exposure to them. Rather, the infant constructs, in stages, a scheme of the object of his knowledge through his sensorimotor activity in the physical and social world of things and persons. Piaget (1954) diagnoses the stages from the infant’s responses to hidden objects. He describes six stages. In the first two, the infant shows no special behavior related to objects. In the next two stages, the infant’s orientation to hidden objects is determined by how he acted on them while they were in view. In the fifth stage, the infant’s search is free of prior activity; he need only see where the object disappears to find it. But it is only in the sixth stage that the infant can consistently imagine and identify the location of objects, even when their place of disappearance is subsequently obscured.
I wish to give special thanks to M. Keith Moo:e. I acknowledge a heavy debt for his inspiration and ideas about the work contained in this review. Also, I am very appreciative of the considerable help Hans Furth has provided on both substantive and editorial issues.
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Gratch, G. (1977). Review of Piagetian Infancy Research. In: Overton, W.F., Gallagher, J.M. (eds) Knowledge and Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2547-5_4
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