Objects in Space and Mind: From Reaching to Words

Cognition, behavior, and development all happen in space, through sensorimotor interactions in a spatial physical world. In his classic theory of the emergence of cognition, Piaget proposed that infant cognition was grounded in these sensorimotor interactions and, indeed, limited by its very sensorimotor nature. One phenomenon that Piaget used to illustrate these ideas was the object concept as manifested in a task that has come to be known as the A‐not‐B task. Infant's perseverative searches for hidden objects in that task suggested object representations tightly tied to the here and now of perceiving and acting. This chapter considers how the spatial perseveration characteristic of babies may play a positive role in keeping track of objects and, indeed, in binding names to objects.