The Child’s world of perception

Perception refers to how children use their senses to gather and understand information and respond to
the world around them. Infants and toddlers use perception during interactions, for exploration, and to
make sense of their experiences. Preschoolers rely on perceptual information to develop greater
awareness of their bodies in space and to move effectively to perform tasks, such as kicking a ball to a
friend.

Though every adult has passed through the world of childhood, he ordinarily finds it hard to remember
how different the world looked to him a child. This is due, in part to the continuous process of growth
and development of the individual, involving many slight, hardly noticed, step by step changes in his
world. Thus, as adults we may tend to assume that the child’s world is not too unlike our own. Except
that it is less full of the fund of knowledge and detail that we acquired over time, we assume that it is
simply a smaller, less complicated version of our own, having the same general dimensions and
structures. Child in his immaturity and inexperience, is more at the mercy of these attributes of objects,
and they may flood over and swamp his perceptions,

The child’s perceptual world may seem to suffer by comparison with the adult’s but there are
compensatory values. The very absence of complete objectivity and “realism” and the sensitivity to the
influence of physiognomic qualities are such as to preserve freshness and spontaneity in the child’s view
of the world. It had been noted that often the mark of a truly great and original person, whether he is an
artist, scientist, inventor, or entrepreneur is that he has somehow retained as an adult much of the
freshness and spontaneity of the “childlike” perception of the world.