1.1 Piaget

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who was interested in how children’s thinking and understanding develop. He undertook observations and set up a range of tasks for children to undertake, and his findings showed that children’s thinking and understanding develop in a series of stages that could be loosely related to their age. The period from birth until around the age of 2 is known as the ‘sensorimotor’ stage, and one of the key features of this period is the development of object permanence. The video below explains what this means.

Activity 1 Development of object permanence

Timing: Allow about 5 minutes

Watch this Open University video which explains development of object permanence.

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Transcript: Video 1

PETER WILLATTS

The newborn infant, the infant in the first two months, has no way of understanding, for example, the continued existence of objects when they can’t be perceived directly, or they can’t be acted upon. So with an object that goes out of view, the parent that leaves the field of view, goes out of the room, ceases to exist. Really, what Piaget is saying is that babies come into the world with the very minimum of knowledge. They have a set of actually fairly complicated reflex activities. But these are reflexes.

These are triggered by situations, such as, touching the baby’s hand will trigger a grasping activity. Seeing something move in the front of the baby will trigger tracking. But the baby only understands very, very little of what’s going on. Perceptual experiences are fleeting. They’re not organized. The baby doesn’t know anything about space and depth and distance, can’t interpret what’s happening. There is simply no understanding of the world, as you or I would understand it.

SPEAKER

Piaget’s ideas about the nature of early mental representations were based on simple but careful observations of babies searching for objects that have been placed out of view.

PETER WILLATTS

That’s good. There you are, down here.

SPEAKER

Piaget found that, with babies like Rebecca, who’s five months old, although she might be interested and excited by a toy, if it’s then hidden while she’s watching, then she behaves as if the toy simply ceases to exist. Piaget reported that there is a blank reaction. The baby just stops, doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t show any indication that she’s aware the toy continues to exist.

PETER WILLATTS

Here. There you are. I bet, if you did it with this one, and we’ll cover it over. If you’ll let her come forward, see if you can find it. Where’s it gone? It disappeared! Where’s it gone? Oh, where’s it gone? Look, here it is! Here it is.

Gradually, the baby begins to focus some attention on the cover, but only for its own sake. So the child will reach out, grab the cover, play with it in some way, and then would notice, this toy, this object, was hidden underneath, and would pick that up.

And gradually, through this repeated experience, and also other experiences, other activities, such as the baby handling an object, moving it out of view, bringing it back in again, moving it behind something else, seeing it go out of existence, out of sight, out of existence-- come back again, beginning to understand that the way to interpret what’s happening is that the object does continue to exist.

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Comment

The concept of object permanence shows us why babies are so fascinated by playing peek-a-boo: they are surprised and excited to see the face or object again because it appears new to them. In order to understand that objects continue to exist even when they are unseen, the baby must develop an idea of the object in their mind, and to do this they need to use their senses to play with them and explore them. By finding out what the object looks, feels, tastes, smells and sounds like the baby builds up a mental image of what it is. This then helps them to realise that the object still exists even when they can’t actually see it.

Once a baby has developed their sense of object permanence, they use this knowledge to develop their thinking by trying to match new experiences and information to their existing understanding, identifying the differences and using this information to create new understanding.

Piaget’s work focused on how the individual child develops their understanding, and he highlighted the importance of providing babies and children with a range of experiences in lots of different environments in order to support development. Practitioners can use Piaget’s work to inform what they do in the baby/toddler room by making sure they let the babies play and explore lots of different objects and toys. This will help them to develop their sense of object permanence and give them lots of opportunities to begin to create their understanding.

Piaget’s work also highlighted the importance of the environment in a child’s development, recognising that they learn by interacting with what’s around them. We can see this aspect of his work in the ‘effective environments’ focus in the Welsh Government’s A Curriculum for Funded Non-maintained Nursery Settings (2022, p. 13), which highlights the role played by the physical and emotional environments we create in motivating children to explore, think creatively and solve problems.