R.

Lécuyer:
European Learning
Psychologist
© 2006 andVol.
Hogrefe
2006; &Infant
Huber Cogn ition
11(4):253–262
Publishers

Can Infant Cognitive Psychology

Be Helpful in Understanding
Learning Processes?
Roger Lécuyer
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

Laboratory of Cognition and Behavior, University of Paris René Descartes, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

Abstract. Since teaching and learning has become a major economic activity of modern society, different learning models can be con-
sidered in order to increase its effectiveness and efficiency. For a long time infant cognitive psychology was influenced by nativist theories
and, thus, early learning has been underestimated and insufficiently studied. However, in recent years, infant psychology has described
developmental sequences, learning situations, and social mechanisms that influence development. Thus, infant psychology appears again
to be developmental. Since infant learning is fast and efficient, this paper proposes that it can be considered as a model for teaching and
learning in older children and adults. Some examples of early acquired knowledge and some acquisition situations are presented. Con-
versely, some examples of later failures are exposed. The relevant theoretical contexts are discussed. The consequences of learning
mechanisms observed in infants for pedagogy are considered.

Keywords: early learning, categorization, object and social knowledge

Postindustrial societies are facing three important issues in
education. First, as scientific and technical knowledge in-
creases, continuous education of the adult workforce is be-
coming an economic necessity. Second, the cost effective-
ness of continuous education becomes important. Conse-
quently, amateurism in pedagogy is coming to an end. We
can no longer assume that a good knowledge holder is nec-
essarily a good knowledge transmitter. In addition, learners
are never a tabula rasa: What they already know affects
their representation of what is to be learned. Therefore,
teaching requires the learners’ representations to be taken
into account.
The cognitive approach to teaching and learning de-
scribes specific aspects of knowledge and knowledge trans-
mission, sociocognitive relations involved in the transmis-
sion of knowledge, and internal representations of this
knowledge. Cognitive psychology has had a huge influence
on the formal teaching of children in school. One of the
major reasons for the important success of Piaget’s theory
and his influence in the fields of psychology and pedagogy,
in spite of the fact that it was a nonpedagogic theory, is that
Piaget provided a model of the learner and was a pioneer
within that domain. Paradoxically, it took time for Vygot-
sky’s theory to become successful, although it was poten-
tially much more applicable to the field of pedagogy. Cog-
nitive psychology has been especially helpful in under-
standing the learning that occurs during the first months of
life when much basic knowledge is acquired and when
learning processes are set in place. Significantly, infants’
learning has some interesting properties: it is common to
all human beings, it is an active process, it is partially a
knowledge transmission situation and, above all, it is usu-
ally very efficient.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze in cognitive terms
what and how infants learn and to infer from that the gen-
eral mechanisms of knowledge acquisition and transmis-
sion that may be useful for resolving the major issues of
continuous education. This may seem a slightly paradoxi-
cal aim: Nativism plays an important theoretical role in in-
fant psychology and if one believes nativism to be right,
nothing important is to be learned in infancy. Moreover,
infants learn differently from children placed in a school
system or adults learning in a continuous process. Howev-
er, a theoretical point of view, different from nativism, can
(and will) be proposed. Infant knowledge acquisition is cer-
tainly not a general model for knowledge acquisition and
transmission, but it surely is an example worth thinking
about.
Infant Cognition: A Revolution in
Developmental Psychology
The analysis begins with Jean Piaget. I will not summarize
his theory here, I will simply make one point. While Gestalt

© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
DOI 10.1027/1016-9040.11.4.253
 254 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
psychologists, (Köhler, 1927), raised the question of
thought without language, Piaget (1936, 1937) raised the
question of intelligence before language. This was a revo-
lutionary idea because until then thought had not been con-
sidered possible without language. Piaget’s ideas have been
and continue to be influential because his theory was deep-
ly coherent and based on biology and logic. His many in-
novative and accurate observations of infants made it pos-
sible to describe their progressively emerging intelligence.
He emphasized that learning involved action and activity
(not the passive association of events) and that intellectual
development was the result of self-construction.
This last point is crucial. In infants, activity is necessar-
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ily a sensorimotor activity. Piaget’s infants have sometimes
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been described as experimental physicists: Their sensori-
motor activity produces changes in the environment that
the infant observes. When eye-hand coordination develops
the physicist’s experiments become reliable enough to al-
low her/him to draw conclusions about the nature of the
world. For example, a few months after this development
habits are influenced by the circumstances of their applica-
tion and behavior becomes intelligent. Then object perma-
nence, the nonlinguistic evidence of a capacity of represen-
tation in infants, can only develop after this vision – pre-
hension coordination, and that is a slow process:
7-month-olds do not search for an object hidden in front of
them, 9-month-olds make the A-not-B error. (The infant
sees an object being hidden at Site A, searches there, and
finds it. S/he is then shown it hidden at Site B but errone-
ously goes back to Site A to search.).
Piaget’s views held sway for 30 years and, thus, sensori-
motor activity was the index of infant intelligence. How-
ever, an underestimated consequence of this index was that
because sensorimotor development is especially slow in
humans the cognitive development it revealed appeared to
be slow as well.
A turning point occurred in infancy research with the
publications by (Berlyne, 1958) and (Fantz, 1958). Most
researchers thought, like Piaget, that young infants had
very poor perceptual capacities until these authors proved
that infants were able to discriminate geometric figures.
Fantz’s methodological contribution was critical: Discrim-
ination capacities were evidenced by using a preferential
looking task. Then, the habituation/dishabituation para-
digm was established. By decreasing the duration of their
visual fixation on a target, infants indicate that they process
and store information, about the target. By increasing their
visual fixation when presented a new target, they indicate
that they discriminate between it and their representation
of familiar stimulus. This procedure is very simple in its
principle but proved to be very powerful.
As early as the 1960s, infants began to be portrayed in
a dramatically different way: the idea of a “competent in-
fant” was born. The competencies they evidenced were
first perceptual and later cognitive. However, the simple
demonstration of a capacity of visual discrimination in ne-
onates was a revolution. Because no structured visual ex-
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
perience is possible before birth, it was supposed that visual
perception emerged slowly during the first months after
birth. Thus, Piaget’s theory became the victim of its own
coherence and credibility to describe early learning pro-
cesses. If action is a necessity for learning and if efficient
sensorimotor action is not possible before 5 to 6 months,
then a capacity evidenced before this age cannot have been
learned. The fundamental ideas in Piaget’s model of devel-
opment were no longer tenable. The, apparently, necessary
alternative was that the capacities were inborn.
Such revisions were proposed by Chomsky, an Ameri-
can linguist, and Bower, a Scottish researcher. For exam-
ple, Bower, Broughton, and Moore (1970) demonstrated
that neonates would reach out when an object was pre-
sented within reach and so concluded that the gesture was
innate. Although some of Bower’s experiments were crit-
icized, several of his observations were replicated by oth-
ers, e.g., neonatal reaching (von Hofsten, 1980). Thus, a
new trend in nativism emerged during the 1970s and was
reinforced during the 1980s. In particular, the evidence of
early object permanence by Baillargeon, Spelke, and Was-
serman (1985) was a strong argument for nativism, and a
subject of debate, as well. Classical nativism had chiefly
been concerned with individual differences and the na-
ture/nurture debate. The new nativism concerned general
laws determining knowledge: “. . . the nativist-empiricist
dialog is not about the interaction of genes and their en-
vironment, but about whether knowledge of things in the
external world develops on the basis of encounters with
those things” (Spelke, 1998; p. 192). An extreme point of
view was defended, in France, by Jacques Mehler (Mehler
& Dupoux, 1990) who argued that fundamental learning
is not possible, that the “initial state” of the new-born’s
mind is not fundamentally different from the “stable state”
of the adult mind, and that infants are programmed for
language and for the essential aspects of knowledge about
objects, space, time, and people.
In brief, the experiments by Fantz and others seeming
to show an inborn preference for human faces, experi-
ments by Eimas and his collaborators (Eimas, 1975, 1985;
Eimas & Miller, 1978; Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vo-
gorito, 1971) showing neonates’ capacities to discriminate
syllables, compelling experiments by Baillargeon evi-
dencing object permanence as early as 2.5 months of age,
and studies by Wynn (1992), pretending to demonstrate a
numerical capacity in 5-month-olds (but see also Lécuyer
et al., 2004) all provided empirical support for the new
nativist point of view. Since a “core knowledge” (Spelke,
1998) was present at birth, a developmental psychology
that described new acquisitions was, at best, of little in-
terest and, at worst, of no interest at all. Conversely, de-
velopmental psychologists who were interested in chil-
dren thought that infant researchers, who based all of their
speculations on simple differences in looking-time, were
ignoring dramatic and important differences between ear-
ly- and later-evidence of the “same” capacities.
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
Back to Development and Learning
However, the growing literature about early perception and
cognition indicated more and more often that a knowledge
evidenced at one age could not be evidenced a few weeks
earlier, hence infant psychology, again, became more and
more developmental. For example, a series of recent experi-
ments by Baillargeon (Baillargeon, 2004; Baillargeon &
Wang, 2002) led to the idea of the presence of “décalages,”
comparable to those observed by Piaget. When a tall object
disappears behind a shorter screen, 4.5-month-olds are more
surprised (look at it longer) than when a short object disap-
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pears behind a taller screen. However, they are not surprised
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if the same object disappears into a small box. Infants begin
to be surprised by this event at 7.5 months. Furthermore, if
instead of placing the object into the box, the event consists
in covering the tall object with the small box upside-down,
the impossibility of the event is not noticed before 12 months
of age. Such different reactions to situations that are percep-
tually very similar are hard to explain within a nativist per-
spective. If the knowledge of the law “tall objects cannot be
hidden by shorter ones” was inborn, the differences in the
applications of the law regarding the type of hiding would not
exist.
Lécuyer (1989) and Mandler (1988, 1992) independently
proposed another approach: No learning processes are possi-
ble before the coordination between the eye and the hand, and
observation is the major source of this learning. Consider that
the habituation/dishabituation procedure is the major source
of our knowledge about infants’ perception and cognition.
Habituation/dishabituation processes occur with spontane-
ous observing behavior because no constraint is placed on
that behavior in the laboratory. Thus, if habituation, an ele-
mentary but powerful learning capacity, occurs in laboratory
tasks lasting only a few minutes, then it can also occur in
everyday life. Habituation to the events that occur in every-
day life could progressively organize the infant’s perception
of their physical and social environment. Thus, a capacity or
a knowledge evidenced in 4-month-olds need not be inborn,
it could have been learned. Compatible theoretical views
have also been proposed by others, i.e., Karmiloff-Smith
(1992), Meltzoff and Moore (1998), and Newcombe (2002).
Some Early Capacities
Such a schema of knowledge acquisition via early learning
processes will be illustrated by examples in order to show
the mechanisms involved.
First, habituation allows discrimination. Fantz et al. (1975)
showed that a square and a circle can be rapidly discriminated
by neonates. Field (1985) showed that after a few hours of
habituation to his/her mother’s face, a neonate visually pre-
fers her face to any other. S/he, therefore, has learned some-
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
255
what sophisticated aspects of a complex stimulus that is al-
ways moving and changing.
Later, a more sophisticated habituation mechanism allows
categorization and discrimination between categories (e.g.,
Lécuyer & Poirier, 1994; Poirier, Lécuyer, & Cybula, 2000).
Three-month-old infants were shown geometric stimuli that
are discriminable but are always composed of four elements.
After habituation, infants were alternately shown a novel
stimulus composed of four elements and a novel one com-
posed of three elements. Infants had a novelty reaction to the
three-element stimulus. Conversely, when habituated with
three elements and tested again with four elements against
three, they looked longer at the four-element target.
This type of experiment is important for at least two rea-
sons. The one most often quoted is that it demonstrates that
young infants cannot only discriminate two figures, they can
also consider them to be equivalent stimuli, and they can
learn novel categories and discriminate between them during
the relatively brief laboratory experiment. This is why cate-
gorization has been much studied in infants (cf. Rakinson &
Oakes, 2003 for a review). The second, usually ignored, rea-
son why these experiments are important is that they illustrate
the infant’s orientation toward knowledge. What is, for an
experimenter, a “categorization experiment” is, for an infant,
the successive apparition of different stimuli, which could
perfectly well have no relation. In spite of that, infants spon-
taneously search for possible relations between the succes-
sive targets shown to them, and they organize and categorize,
these stimuli. Perception is necessarily an active process.
Consider again the experiments by Baillargeon. The ob-
served “décalage” can be explained by the everyday life of
infants observing their environment. For example, when the
infant’s mother moves around the room she partially disap-
pears behind a table, but completely disappears behind a cup-
board, and the comparison of the sizes of the different objects
involved can be easily made. Children aged 4.5 months,
therefore, know that a tall object cannot disappear behind a
short one. Experiences being rarer, it takes longer to learn that
a tall object cannot disappear inside a short container, and
even longer to notice that a tall object cannot disappear under
a short cover. So, Baillargeon tested this idea by performing
teaching experiments (Baillargeon, 1999, 2000, 2004; Bail-
largeon & Wang, 2002). She, for example, taught 5-month-
olds that an object that is more “off” of a stand than “on” the
stand must fall and showed that the infant was surprised when
it did not fall. This and other rules she taught were usually
understood at 6 months.
Perception in Two or Three
Dimensions?
These categorization and perceptual learning experiments
indicate that infants progressively organize their environ-
mental space. However, a very important aspect of this
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
 256 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
learning is that the difficulties encountered by infants are
not necessarily those imagined by adults. A fascinating ex-
ample of this is the perception of the third dimension. For
centuries, and probably since the discovery of the anatomy
of the retina, the supposed problem for visual perception
was to go from a bi-dimensional perception to a three-di-
mensional perception. Piaget, for example, described early
visual perception as a succession of sensory “tableaux” en-
dowed with two essential properties: they are ephemeral
and bi-dimensional.
Some of the first experiments (e.g., Fantz, 1961; Fantz
& Nevis, 1967) demonstrated the capacity of very young
infants to discriminate two-dimensional (2D) and three-di-
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mensional (3D) stimuli and their preference for 3D. Other
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experiments studied how infants perceive the third dimen-
sion (e.g., Yonas, 1977; Yonas & Grandrud, 1985a,b; Yonas
& Owsley, 1987; Yonas, Pettersen, & Granrud, 1982).
These studies demonstrated that the infant’s sensitivity to
the different properties that index the third dimension (ki-
netic, binocular, and pictorial information) develops be-
tween birth and the second half of the first year. Durand
and her collaborators (Durand & Lécuyer, 2002; Durand,
Lécuyer, & Frichtel, 2003; Lécuyer & Durand, 1998) ex-
amined the development of the infant’s understanding that
a 2D picture can represent the 3D world. Although Spelke
(1998) considers this capacity to be inborn, this type of
representation is more likely a cultural product, as the his-
tory of art indicates that the capacity to use perspective in
painting only appeared during the Renaissance period.
Therefore, Durand, et al. systematically replicated different
experiments performed by Renée Baillargeon by showing
infants how the events unfolded on a TV screen. Their re-
sults strongly suggest that the acquisition of the capacity to
use depth cues is under way at 4 months of age. Perspective
may or may not be used, depending on the display condi-
tions. Therefore, the ability to take into account aspects of
the stimulus that are, in fact, not visible seems to be learned
during that period, that is to say, before the coordination of
prehension and vision. The movement in the events por-
trayed is important for structuring space, because depth
cues are used much later when infants are tested with mo-
tionless stimuli (Kavsek, 1999, 2002).
Causality
The question of causality perception and conception by the
human infant may be viewed in various ways. These ways
are so different that one can wonder what the relations be-
tween these different causality situations are and whether
“causality” has the same meaning in each case. In situations
where the infant is attending to an event implying a causal
relation, it is necessary to distinguish those in which the
infant is directly involved from those in which s/he is not.
Moreover, in addition to distinguishing between situations
that are objectively and subjectively very different, one
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
must wonder about the presence or absence of identity of
the cognitive capacities involved in the emergence of the
comprehension of causal relations.
From a Piagetian point of view, it is first necessary for
the infant to understand the relations between his/her ac-
tivities and the effects they produce (understanding means-
ends relations) before the infant can understand causality
relations between independent events. The opposite point
of view is proposed by Michotte (1962). The situations he
describes as involving “phenomenal causality” are ex-
tremely salient. When perceived by adults, the situations
give such an obvious sensation of causality that they can
only be innate gestalt, completely independent of the ex-
perience provided by the subjects’ activity.
The question is not simply to know whether the two
types of causal relations are acquired simultaneously or in
a specific order but rather to distinguish between causal
relations that simply imply objects and those that bring into
play animate beings, people in particular. One of the most
puzzling aspects of Piaget’s observations about causality
conception in infants is the almost total absence of situa-
tions that bring other animate beings into play. The absence
occurs in two ways. On the one hand, the subject’s task is
an analysis of relations between physical objects rather
than human beings. On the other hand, the social aspect of
the situation is deliberately ignored by Piaget in his analy-
sis of what he labels “magico-phenomenist” causality. In-
deed, if an infant pulls a ribbon that is not connected to
anything but always results in an adult producing a noise,
then there is an obvious causal relation between the baby’s
action and the noise that results from it. The absence of a
physical continuity between the ribbon held by the infant
and the source of sound is simply an epiphenomenon.
Moreover, in the infant’s everyday life, social agents are
the objects they can influence in the easiest way. Thus, for
infants, the most frequently observed causal relations im-
ply at least one adult.
Beyond this question, the fundamental problem is that
of the relations between intentionality and causality. Sci-
entists’ answers are biased. Their job consists in searching
for causes and when a causal agent happens to be a human
adult, they may conclude that the agent may also have an
intention. When the scientific object is no longer the human
adult but an infant, an animal, or a fortiori an inanimate
object, the goal of the researcher is to consider the most
parsimonious hypothesis and to infer no intention whenev-
er possible.
This way of reasoning is a thought process specific to
scientists and different from the everyday behavior of hu-
man beings who speak to their pets and attribute intentions
to them. In the history of humanity, Gods, that is to say
intentions, came before one God, that is to say a system of
intents, and Nature, that is to say a causal system as an
explanation of observed phenomena. I would not assert that
ontogenesis develops like history, but simply wonder
whether in infants, too, intention prevails over cause. If
such were the case, the causal situation that only implies
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
objects, like Michotte’s situations or logical relations,
would constitute an abstraction from more complex situa-
tions in which causal relations would be better known and
easily understood.
How do infants construe the temporal aspects of causal
situations? Some important information has been obtained
from a series of experiments by Friedman, (2002, 2003)
about what he calls the “arrows of time.” These ingenious
experiments occur as follows: A simple and nonreversible
event is filmed (water is poured on a table, dices are
thrown, a cookie is broken, etc.) and the film is presented
to an observer, either forward or backward. The age of the
participants varies from 4 to 18 months. The evolution of
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their responses is developmentally invariant and Friedman
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gives a convincing interpretation of the sequence. First, in-
fants look equally at both events (they do not understand
the sequence and, therefore, make no distinction between
the forward and the reverse film). Later, they look longer
at the forward film (they begin to understand the sequence
and can organize it in the normal way but not in the reverse
way, so they look longer at what they can follow). Still later,
they look equally at both events again (a transition period).
Finally, they look longer at the backwards film (they un-
derstand the two sequences and see that one is normal and
the other is strange).
These experiments are interesting for two reasons. First,
they throw light on the conditions in which infants look
longer at normal and abnormal events. Second, they indi-
cate that infants slowly become able to integrate temporal
sequences, with important differences depending on the
events presented. This development is strikingly parallel to
those observed in the comprehension of space, and Cohen,
Amsel, Redford, and Casasola (1998) describe the same
type of development for causality.
Representation
All of the infants’ capacities described above raise two
questions. The first one concerns the representational sys-
tem that is necessary to sustain these capacities, while the
second concerns the origins of this knowledge.
The question of representation is an old one. It is also a
question about which Piaget was innovative. Before his
theory, language was conceived as the necessary condition
for representation, and in French language developmental
psychology, the discussions between Piaget and Wallon on
this question are famous. Wallon (1941) defended the clas-
sical idea, and Piaget proposed that object permanence was
good evidence for a representational capacity. If object per-
manence exists in 2.5-month-olds then a representational
capacity exists. One can then ask whether “object perma-
nence,” as evidenced by differences in looking duration,
refer to the same capacity as “object permanence” evi-
denced by active searching for disappeared objects. In oth-
er words, are there different levels of representation? Con-
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
257
sider habituation: When a neonate is habituated to a stim-
ulus and dishabituates to a new one, s/he necessarily has a
type of representation, but it is not necessary to suppose
that this representation is the same as the conceptual or
symbolic representation that exists with language, where
“something” is represented and “something” is represent-
ing. Wallon and Piaget may both have been right; they were
quite simply not talking about the same thing.
Representation has been the topic of an important chap-
ter by Mandler (1998). She formulated both an empirical
and a theoretical criticism concerning Piaget’s theory, par-
ticularly his opposition between early sensorimotor (proce-
dural) representation and later conceptual representation.
The empirical criticism consisted in highlighting the idea
that a series of recent results suggested the existence of an
early conceptual representation. The theoretical criticism
argued that Piaget did not describe the transition from sen-
sorimotor to conceptual representation in a unique and un-
equivocal way. Mandler then reviewed the types of infor-
mation infants represent (i.e., objects, perceptual catego-
ries, and concept formation or prelinguistic meanings),
opposing procedural and conceptual knowledge. Notwith-
standing the importance of this distinction, and the con-
vincing empirical and theoretical arguments put forth by
Mandler, this opposition does not solve the problem raised
by the concept of representation, especially in infants. If,
as she suggests, conceptual representations exist early in
infancy and are not simply perceptual procedural represen-
tations, then different levels of representation must be dis-
tinguished. In fact, Mandler’s point of view is weakened
by the fact that she assimilates perceptual representation to
procedural representation. In habituation/dishabituation
situations a first stimulus is presented for a series of trials
and when looking-duration decreases, a new stimulus is
presented. If the two stimuli are discriminated, looking-du-
ration then increases. Therefore, the infant must have
stored a representation of the first stimulus or event pre-
sented. This storage is the result of perceptual/memory pro-
cesses but the content of the representation is at least as
much stimulus-dependent as procedure-dependent. How-
ever, this does not mean that neonates have a symbolic rep-
resentational system. Long ago, Gouin-Décarie (1969)
made a more radical objection to the Piagetian point of
view: Since the absence of hands in thalidomide infants
was not a cause of delay in development, sensorimotricity
did not appear to be a major component of representation
or a basic condition for it, and representation does not ap-
pear to be procedural.
Meltzoff and Moore (1998) proposed a model in which
neonates have a representational system that is sufficient
for habituation and novelty reaction and also provides the
basis for future cognitive development. As a matter of fact,
it seems necessary to assume that early cognitive develop-
ment is based on a representational system that becomes
more complex during infancy. Although they hypothesize
a representational capacity at birth, they do not quite belong
to the nativist trend, since the representational capacity
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
 258 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
they hypothesize is limited and does not imply object per-
manence or knowledge about object identity. While there
is no major problem with respect to the cognitive capacities
these require, the intermediate steps between a novelty re-
action and object permanence are not specified. Thus, Du-
rand and Lécuyer (2002) and Lécuyer (2004) propose to
distinguish three levels:
– Level 1: Concrete or analogical representation. The rep-
resentation is a translated copy of a stimulus. If the same
stimulus is presented again, it will be recognized. If an-
other stimulus is presented, it will be differentiated.
– Level 2: Abstract representation. The representation
may include variations in the stimulus and a property
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common to all variations. When a new stimulus is pre-
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sented, its properties are compared to those that are
stored in the representation. When the information given
is partial, this comparison includes rebuilding properties
that are absent from the stimulus but present in the rep-
resentation. When an object disappears, some of its
properties (e.g., size, solidity) can be considered in the
infant’s reasoning.
– Level 3: Symbolic representation. The relation between
the represented object and the representing entity is ar-
bitrary. Language and counting activities are typical of
this level (and therefore, 5-month-olds cannot count).
Four consequences of the three levels are discussed. (1)
Object permanence cannot be inborn, for it supposes the
second level of representation. (2) The period between
about 2 months and 6 months is crucial for the organization
of understanding the bases of space and time. (3) The in-
capacity of infants to search for disappeared objects, and
later their errors in research are still to be explained. (4)
Whatever the role of perception in knowledge acquisition,
the conditions in which this acquisition can take place are
still to be described.
1. Object permanence cannot be inborn, for it supposes the
second level of representation. If object permanence is
not inborn (as supposed for example by Spelke or Bail-
largeon), one must try to describe how it can be acquired
(Baillargeon’s argument for the innate character of this
knowledge is that it cannot be learned). I will describe
the acquisition of object permanence a little later.
2. The period between about 2 months and 6 months is cru-
cial for the organization of understanding the bases of
space and time. No specific comments will be made here
because this thesis is defended throughout the present
paper.
3. The third consequence is crucial: Within its absence, ear-
ly “object permanence” should not really be object per-
manence. This question has been frequently used as an
argument against the hypothesis of early object perma-
nence (Bogartz, Shinskey, & Schilling, 2000; Cashon &
Cohen, 2000; Haith, 1998; Meltzoff & Moore, 1998). In
the same vein, a second question arises: Why do 9-
month-olds who search successfully for an object at Site
A go back to this site when the same object is obviously
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
hidden at Site B? For some authors, only the infant’s
capacity to search for an object that has disappeared pro-
vides a clear evidence for object permanence. Thus, for
them, the existence of object permanence has been dem-
onstrated in 18-month olds (Piaget, 1936, 1937) and
demonstrations of an earlier capacity for object perma-
nence are suspect, because they are based on less obvi-
ous indices and methodologies.
Two points must be underlined. First, searching-for-objects
is a controversial subject (e.g., Haith, 1998; Spelke, 1998).
Second, while opinions are divided about whether the vio-
lation-of-expectation paradigm is adequate to demonstrate
object permanence, almost everyone considers that search
situations are a good test of object permanence. I would
like to question this assumption strongly.
Consider, if you will, two exclusive hypotheses: Either
there is a gap between infants’ capacity for object perma-
nence and their separate capacity to efficiently search for
a disappeared object or there is not a gap and the efficient
searching is the only criterion for (implies) object perma-
nence.
If the first alternative is correct, it is necessary to explain
the cause of the large age difference between object per-
manence and efficient searching. A good explanation must
refer to a more general rule, one that can explain the dis-
crepancy between the separate capacities for object perma-
nence and efficient searching within the same domain and
across different conditions and across different domains, as
well. Moreover, if such a gap exists, it means that search
activity per se is a problem for a long period of develop-
ment. Consequently, sensorimotricity cannot be a major
source of knowledge, which is inconsistent with Piagetian
views but not with nativist and perceptual theories of de-
velopment, and motor impairment is not a source of delay
in the development of spatial cognition.
If the second alternative is correct (efficient searching
implies object permanence) then there must be a general
explanation for the observation that infants look at unex-
pected events longer than expected events in situations test-
ing for object permanence, searching may be inefficient
while object permanence is emerging (from 7 to 18
months), but efficient searching must occur after this peri-
od and motor impairments should delay the development
of children’s spatial cognition.
A general rule of psychology is that comprehension pre-
cedes production or, more generally, that knowing all the
terms of a problem does not necessarily give the solution
to the problem, e.g., toddlers understand many words but
usually use just a few, or reading the map of a city does not
necessarily result in efficient travel in that city. A remark-
able exception to this general rule is the neo-Piagetian view
that when object permanence appears (infants know that a
disappeared object still exists), they must also be able to
search for it, independently of their capacities to program
gestures. Maybe this idea is a result of the fact that adults
search for an object they have lost in a rational and efficient
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
way, for example never searching back in a place where
they previously saw that the object was not.
Consider the A-not-B error: Numerous studies indicate
that 9-month-olds typically make at least two different
types of errors. First, some infants search at Site A, where
they previously found the object, in spite of the fact that
the object is obviously hidden at Site B. Maybe they think
the object is still in that location, because they did not pick
up and thus, did not store all the information necessary for
successful performance. Second, other infants know that
their searching strategy is not a good one and that they will
not find the object at Site A, but they do not know the
appropriate strategy to follow in order to avoid this mis-
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
take. Three observations clearly demonstrate the second
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
type of error. First, some infants who make the A-not-B
error look in the direction of Site B while manually search-
ing at Site A (Diamond, 1991, 1998). Second, Corter,
Zucker, and Galligan (1980) conducted experiments where
the infant’s mother was the object. On Trial 1 the infant’s
mother leaves the room through Door A and on Trial 2 she
leaves through Door B. On the second trial 9 of 13 subjects
went back to door A, and some of them were crying and
manifesting signs of conflict. Infants whose mothers left
the room twice through Door A made no errors and were
not upset. The authors inferred that the infants vaguely
knew that they were going to the wrong place, but were not
able to use another strategy. At least some of the infants
who made the error seemed to be unable to program their
activity toward success. Because of these observations Lé-
cuyer, (1993) tested 5- and 9-month-old infants in a purely
visual, nonmotoric search task. None of the infants made
any searching errors.
Rivière and Lécuyer (2002, 2003) further tested the two
hypotheses posed above in an investigation of the role of
self-initiated locomotion in the development of spatial cog-
nition. If locomotor impairment is a risk factor for the de-
velopment of spatial cognition (Campos et al., 2000), early
representational capacities should be affected and the role
of sensorimotor development in cognition must be reeval-
uated. They observed children with spinal muscular atro-
phy (SMA). SMA is a hereditary neuromuscular disease
characterized by severe progressive muscular weakness.
The subjects had difficulty crawling and walking had never
been possible. Healthy children were also tested. The chil-
dren were 30-months old.
In the first experiment, (inversion of two hiding sites by
rotation of a table), both groups had the same level of suc-
cess. In the second experiment, three cloths were placed in
front of the child. While the child watched, the experiment-
er’s hand moved along a path in such a way as to disappear
successively under Cloth A, B, and C, and to reappear be-
tween them. The examiner silently released a toy under B.
Finally, he opened his hand to reveal that it was empty. The
child was then allowed to search for the toy. Overall, chil-
dren with SMA searched correctly for the hidden object
and healthy children performed at chance level.
Analysis revealed that on Trial 1, children with SMA
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
259
showed much longer latencies before reaching. On Trial 2
latencies to reaching were similar for both groups. The dif-
ference between groups results from more impulsive re-
sponses by the healthy children. When the time between
the hiding of the toy and the child’s response was increased,
healthy children’s success level was equivalent to that of
children with SMA.
Why do healthy children, unlike children with SMA,
frequently search for the hidden object at the location
where they last saw the hand of the examiner reappear,
despite the fact that they could easily spot the object at the
second hiding site? Why is it easier for healthy children to
inhibit a false response when more time has elapsed be-
tween the hiding place and the opportunity to search? Do
30-month-old healthy children lack object permanence? It
seems that healthy children’s errors stem from their failure
to inhibit their urge to reach in the direction in which the
experimenter’s hand had last been seen. Children with
SMA, for whom every gesture is costly, think before reach-
ing. Both groups had the same knowledge, but performance
is not simply the result of knowledge.
Infants and Their Social Environment
4. Concerning the fourth consequence of the representa-
tional system in infants and its development proposed by
Durand and Lécuyer, at different points in this text refer-
ences have been made to the social environment of infants
and its role. The classical, and reasonable, view is that
adults provide the socioaffective conditions sufficient (or
not) to allow cognitive development. My proposal is that
the role of the community is also more directly cognitive.
Recall Baillargeon’s analysis of why the capacity for ob-
ject permanence is inborn: Infants learn by contrasting sit-
uations (a short object is hidden behind an occluder, a tall
object is not; and an object which is sufficiently supported
stays, one which is not falls). However, with object per-
manence there is no contrasting situation, a present object
can be seen but one which is absent shows no manifesta-
tion of its existence. Therefore, there is no possible learn-
ing, and so object permanence must be inborn. The rea-
soning is interesting, but what if an object makes a sound?
The sensory relation (visual absence but auditory pres-
ence) is a manifestation of the object’s permanence. Moth-
ers seem to know this. When they leave their infants for
a few seconds they speak to them. When they leave for a
long time, they sometimes give the infant an object that
holds their smell. The same reasoning can be made for
tactile stimulation. When someone changes the infant’s
diaper the infant is sometimes in a position where s/he
cannot see the person, but is still touched by this person.
All of these intersensorial combinations are possible and,
in fact, happen in infants’ everyday lives. And, these are
good conditions to learn object permanence. There are
other such everyday conditions that would support learn-
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
 260 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
ing. For instance, the different appearances of an infant’s
mother depending on her distance, visual angle, or cloth-
ing provide good training situations for categorizing her
as the “same” mother. Studies by Hains and Muir (1996)
and Nadel et al. (1999) (see Muir & Nadel, 1998) indicate
that 2-month-olds are able to differentiate images of their
mothers on a TV screen when her behavior is contingent
on their communication from images where her behavior
is not contingent on theirs. More simply, perception ex-
periments demonstrate an important role of movement as
an attention getter and an information provider (cf. the
perception of 2D displays). In an infant’s environment, the
most common moving stimulus is a human being. A “the-
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
ory” based on the principle that what moves is a human
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
and what does not move is an object is ontologically false,
but statistically right in an infant’s environment.
The main domain in which adults are a major source of
knowledge is probably causality. Infants can efficiently in-
fluence their social environment long before they can reli-
ably affect objects. Therefore, it is in the social domain that
they first register causal relations. However, the efficiency
of this process depends on parents’ responsiveness. analo-
gous to the way that a teacher’s efficiency varies as a func-
tion of his/her capacity to represent the learners’ needs and
to give the appropriate response at the appropriate moment
(e.g., Bornstein, 1989; Pêcheux, 2004).
Even when adults are not by themselves the source of
knowledge they organize the perceptual and cognitive con-
ditions in which knowledge can develop. They move ob-
jects, and if an object is potentially noisy, they produce the
noise, they hide and show objects, partially or completely,
they speak to infants in ways that correspond to their dif-
ferent needs and capacities (Papousek & Papousek, 2002).
In sum, adults place infants in the best possible conditions
for learning. The necessity to introduce the significant role
of the infant’s social environment in the description of early
cognition takes infant cognitive psychology, again, back
into developmental psychology.
Conclusion
The different aspects of learning in infants mentioned here
can be summarized in the following way:
1. During the first months of life infants learn very rapidly.
This is evidenced by the sheer number of environment
rules they learn during that period and by the efficiency
of their capacity to learn in the few minutes of a labora-
tory experiment.
2. Perception is an activity that plays a major role in infant
learning. This is demonstrated, for example, by catego-
rization experiments in which infants can learn a non-
natural and, therefore, unknown category in a few min-
utes.
3. Before the coordination of eye and hand, “core knowl-
edge” allows infants to understand most of the simple
European Psychologist 2006; Vol. 11(4):253–262
events intervening in their environment and the rules
that govern these basic events. Therefore, sensorimotor
activity is not a necessary condition for learning and
may sometimes lead to errors.
4. Conceptual knowledge must be separated from proce-
dural knowledge (knowing-how). Procedural knowl-
edge cannot be considered as a necessary condition to
evidence conceptual knowledge: Errors in performance
do not necessarily reflect a lack of knowledge.
5. Human beings, and especially parents, play a major role
in infant learning. They are the essential source of vari-
ations present in the environment. They present infants
with optimal conditions to understand environmental
rules. They try to answer infants’ cognitive and affective
needs, i.e., they usually are responsive.
Reprise
What does this discussion of infant cognition suggest
about meeting the urgent need of knowledge transmission
in our postindustrial societies? First, it is commonplace to
say that motivation plays an important role in learning.
Therefore, infant cognition questions this view. When and
how is the spontaneous attitude of motivation to learn
lost? Infants’ spontaneous learning activity is probably a
model to be further explored. Second, a superficial inter-
pretation of Piaget’s theory has sometimes led to an “ac-
tive pedagogy” mistaking activity and excitement. Young
infants show us that they can be active while calmly lean-
ing in their seat. Third, consideration of these first two
points suggests that the current mode of increasing learn-
ing in infants through ambitious programs of stimulation
does not appear to be theoretically founded. On the con-
trary, stimulation imposed on infants can teach them to
wait for new stimulation, that is to say, to remain passive.
Mutatis mutandis, a great pressure exists for more practi-
cal and active teaching, but the point is not to produce an
active or passive way of learning, learning is an active
process. The point is to know the object of the activity. In
other words, teaching is often criticized for being too the-
oretical, but 3-month-old infants’ learning is theoretical.
Fourth, there is a paradox concerning teaching infants.
Most infants are not in school and what they learn was
learned long before schools were invented. Parents are not
appointed teachers, and most of them are not conscious of
what they teach or even of being teachers. Nevertheless,
the learning and the teaching are essential and effective.
The teaching and learning that occurs during infancy is
certainly not a direct model for teaching modern sciences
and techniques, but higher-level teaching might benefit
from a better knowledge of the reasons for the efficiency
of infant learning.
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers
 R. Lécuyer: Learning and Infant Cognition
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About the authors
Roger Lécuyer is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the
Institut de Psychologie, Université René Descartes, Paris, France.
His research domain is infant perception and cognition. He is cur-
rently President of the French Federation of Psychologists and
Psychology (FFPP).
Roger Lécuyer
Laboratoire Cognition & Comportement
71, avenue Edouard Vaillant
F-92774 Boulogne-Billancourt cedex
France
E-mail Roger.lecuyer@univ-paris5.fr
© 2006 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers