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Intellectual Growth and the Developing Child
The person who contributed most to our knowledge of how thinking takes place in children was the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. For nearly fifty years he observed children, starting with his own. He noted how they explain what they can and cannot do at successive stages in their intellectual or cognitive development. He realized that to learn to think a child must be able to process information into new forms. This can be done only when the child is intellectually ready.
A child must be able to go beyond perceiving the environment to constructing concepts about it. For example, a young child who goes for a walk at night thinks the moon is following along. As the child gets older, he or she realizes that seeing is not necessarily believing.
For us, the disappearance of an object does not mean that it no longer exists. For an infant under one year, what cannot be seen, isn't. A toy that is out of sight does not exist, even if the toy is returned and taken away several times. In a game of peekaboo with a ten- or eleven-month-old, when your face keeps disappearing and appearing again, the child is amazed; to him or her you're not just hiding: you're nowhere. Only at about twelve months, Piaget told us, does a child have the understanding that an object has simply been moved to another place. This insight is an awareness of object permanence.
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