ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews research on the origin of the concept of animacy, and, in particular, on the development of the ability to distinguish between people and graspable objects during the first year of life. The background to this work is the traditional Piagetian assumption that an understanding of the social and physical world needs to be constructed through acting on it during the infancy period. Through these actions mental structures develop that permit infants to separate self from the environment and to understand that there are social and nonsocial objects in the world. Theories that put forth such assumptions view the infant as born into a world of chaotic stimuli that are perceived through unintegrated sensory modalities. These theories view the baby as lacking an awareness of space, time, and causality, and consequently of self and the physical and social environment. However, current infancy research suggests that Piaget’s view should be questioned. There is evidence of cross-modal integration in 4-month-old infants because they will vocalize when hearing the voices of invisible people, but make reaching movements when hearing the sounds of invisible toys. Thus, the sound had come to indicate the identity of a specific object, a realization that is likely to come with the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight. These same infants also respond differentially to people and objects in a game of hide and seek. They will reach toward the occluder behind which objects have disappeared, but call for people in order to bring them back to view (Legerstee, 1994a). Because the infants were making inferences about the properties of people and objects that they could not perceive, this example suggests in addition to cross-modal integration, some type of conceptual understanding of how to interact with people and things long before the infancy period has ended.
