ABSTRACT
The human infant plays at least three roles in the construction of development, functioning at different times in the roles of transition, projective screen, and preview. Although the language of developmental psychology has the ring of modernity, one of its presuppositions bears a relation to the pre-Darwinian image of a great unbroken chain of being from jellyfish to man. The chapter shows that the infant's first cognitive structure is a schema, which is defined as an abstract representation of an event that retains the relations among the physical dimensions of the original experience— be it object, sound, smell, or dynamic sequence. The mechanism of schema formation is controversial, in part, because of the reasonable desire to base the process of cognitive development on one principle. Those who wish to make cognition dependent on motor action, the Piagetians being the clearest example, insist that the first structures are functional in nature.
