Infants really enjoy peek-a-boo –– the game where parents hide their face with their hand and then suddenly remove their hands from their face and say, "peek-a-boo!" For Piaget, this would be a good example of how infants lack: 1 point a. reversibility b. theory of mind c. object permanence d. centration e. conservation 2.Question 2 The three mount
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Boasting about the speed of childhood development is the sport of choice for many a doting parent.
From the 12-week scan right through the early years, monitoring the physical and mental progress of their pride and joy is a source of both excitement and concern.
Especially rewarding is the onset of smiles, squeals and laughter - the kind of milestones that make all the disturbed nights worth it.
But is it all just wind?
Apparently not, as researchers now think that laughter and games like peek-a-boo could be telling us something more, and giving us a way to peer inside the workings of their minds.
"Laughter and smiles start incredibly early, just like tears," says Dr Caspar Addyman, a baby laughter researcher at Birkbeck College in London.
"So this leads us to think that it's a form of communication," he told the BBC.
Dr Addyman has collected nearly 700 questionnaires about baby smiles and laughter from around the world. He's still looking for more examples.
He found that babies are smiling in response to pleasant feelings much earlier than expected, which can be as young as one month old.
Soon after that, at between two to four months, social smiles develop that are used specifically to engage the parents.
He now hopes to take the research further and use laughter as a new way of tracking what it is that babies understand about the world around them.
The person who most greatly influenced our current view of childhood development was Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
Careful observations of children at different ages led him to identify four stages that everyone must go through to reach the cognitive abilities of an adult (see box).
In the earliest months of life, Piaget said that babies are only able to learn about the world by directly interacting with it through grasping, shaking and sucking.
With each experience, he concluded, children gradually build up a picture of how the world works - a kind of naïve physics.
But Dr Addyman thinks that studying babies' laughter can be just as effective at helping us pinpoint developments in the way their minds are expanding.
"You can't laugh at something until you get the joke, so what they laugh at really tells us about their understanding of the world," says Addyman.
Peek-a-boo
As a result of having experienced so little, small children are for the most part quite content to accept the absurd as completely plausible.
Dr Addyman, who sports a crop of bright blue hair, sees this regularly with his young volunteers.
"Young babies would never laugh at my hair. But older children realise there's something wrong and that makes it funny."
The ability of children to suddenly see the funny side, Dr Addyman believes, acts to highlight much more profound developments going on deep inside their brains.
The Baby Laughter Project, which has surveyed parents from more than 20 countries, has shown that games like peek-a-boo are perfect for showing one such fundamental development - object permanence.
The term describes the understanding that an object still exists, even if you can't see it.
Very young children don't know this, which is why babies under around six months can look shocked and startled at peek-a-boo.
They think that not being able to see mum or dad's face means that they've actually disappeared, making their sudden reappearance come as quite a surprise.
However once a child understands (at around six- to eight-months old) that their parent is just hiding, then peek-a-boo becomes all about the anticipation of when they're going to come