Perceptual space, representational space, and the haptic perception of shape

Piaget holds that the child’s building up of a geometrical representation of space develops very slowly, and that for his first perceptions and rudimentary notions of spatial relationships we must turn to the branch of mathematics known as ‘topology’. Although, mathematically speaking, this represents a late and advanced level of theory, it rests on very early modes of perception from which the small child can most readily form his first elementary spatial representations.