ABSTRACT
Not so long ago, the prevailing view was that human infants possessed little in the way of perceptual capacities during the first few months of life. Even such an astute observer of children as Piaget (1952) credited the infant under four months with only the most primitive kinds of abilities for perceiving the world. For Piaget, the basic schemas of looking, grasping, hearing, and sucking by which the child is to build up a conception of the world, were all relatively undifferentiated in the infant under four months of age. In the interim since Piaget first made his observations, a number of technological and methodological advances have made it possible to achieve a much more precise estimate of the infant's underlying perceptual capacities. As a result, our appreciation of the nature and sophistication of the young infant's perceptual capacities has grown considerably.
