ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years or so a growing body of data on early perceptual competence has forced a change in the prevalent image of the young infant. In competition with the traditional Piagetian view of the infant as initially bereft of awareness of the world, the image of the competent infant has emerged, with even newborns credited with objective awareness of their surroundings. There has been a tendency to identify this as a simple matter of progress in science: as new techniques have emerged for studying young infants, data have accumulated apparently showing that Piaget was quite simply wrong and that infants are sophisticated perceivers from birth. Although current evidence indicates that there are some important limitations to newborn perception, the indication is that these limitations are largely overcome within a few months, and on some measures it appears that by around four months infants are well on the way to the sort of understanding of the world that Piaget saw emerging only gradually through the infant's systematic actions in the environment.
