THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYand that it’s only when they reach what he called the “concrete-opera-
tional” stage of development (at around seven) that they are able to look
at the world from other people’s perspectives.
However, new research is challenging Piaget’s conclusions, showing
that a child’s sense of other people’s minds first emerges far earlier than
his postulated concrete-operational stage. For example, experts now
believe that babies as young as twelve months already have a rudimen-
tary understanding of other people’s intentions. Terje Falck-Ytter and his
colleagues at Uppsala University’s Baby Lab in Sweden recorded babies’
eye movements as they watched videos of a person placing toys into a
bucket. Babies of six months stayed fixated on the toys, but the gaze of
those of twelve months, just like adults, leapt ahead to the bucket, as if
anticipating the person’s intentions. Further research has shown that a
nineteen-month-old infant can tell the difference between a joke and
a mistake, two-year-olds have a rudimentary understanding of owner-
ship, and toddlers will routinely help you out if you drop some pens or
can’t quite reach an object that you’re stretching for. A rather charming
experiment by Betty Repacholi and Alison Gopnik even showed that
eighteen-month-olds will feed broccoli to an adult, rather than their
own favoured crackers, if that’s what they’ve seen the adult enjoy earlier.
Another example of where Piaget’s findings are being revised concerns
“object permanence” – the understanding that objects continue to exist
even when we can’t see them. Piaget thought that this concept was
beyond babies, and that their behaviour suggests that they think an
object will come into existence as a consequence of their act of looking.
For example, if you repeatedly hide a ball under a first cup and then, in
full view, place it under a second cup, babies will still look for it under
the first cup.
Contradicting Piaget, more modern explanations think this mistake
and others like it have more to do with infant memory limitations or
babies’ inability to inhibit their temptation to look under the first cup
when they’ve found it there so many times before. Perhaps the most
recent and creative reinterpretation was offered in 2008 by Jozsef Topal
and others at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. They argued that
when we communicate with babies using eye contact and chirpy chatter,
they have an innate tendency to assume that what we’re communicating
to them is a general fact about the world. When the researchers repeated
the ball-and-cup experiment without any patter or eye contact, the babies
were far more likely to look under the second cup.