The Child and his Behavior. A. R. Luria

Primitive Perception

The child begins to see the world after he has passed through an entire phase of his life as an “organic creature”, cut off from the world and immersed in his own organic experiences. While in the womb before birth, and to a slightly lesser extent in the first few weeks of life, the child is totally isolated from external stimuli. Accordingly it is not surprising that when his eyes begin to see, they do not see as ours do. The child’s perceptions, starting with his perceptions of time and space, are still primitive and peculiar; a long time will pass before they assume the forms of perception usually found in adults.

Let us consider simple things first. Having experienced predominantly organic sensations at the beginning of his life – rest or disturbance, tension or relaxation, pain, touching, warmth and in particular the irritation of the most sensitive areas – the child’s spatial perception obviously differs from ours. Hemholz relates how, when he was 3-4 years of age, he assumed that the people he could see standing on the gallery of a church belltower were dolls, so he asked his mother to take them down, in the belief that she could do so merely by stretching out her hand. [4] At one time or another, each of us has seen a child reach out to grab the moon, or to catch a bird in flight, etc. For a child aged 2-4, there is no such thing as perspective: visual perceptions are governed by different, far more primitive principles; the external world is still perceived in a primitive manner, and is moreover perceived as being so close that the child can readily exercise various primitive forms of possession over it, by touching grasping and feeling. The prevalence of these primitive forms of contact with the world was what prompted Bühler to identify three phases in the development of spatial perception in the child, referring to oral (involving eating and sucking), tactile and visual mastery of space (Mundraum, Tastraum and Fernraum). And it is true that the child first knows the world through his mouth, then his hands; it is not until later that vision lays the foundations of a structure of perceptions that does not develop fully until the child is much older.

Since the organs of perception linking the child to the external world, such as the eyes and ears, become active only quite late, then the whole picture of the world perceived by the child is clearly quite different from ours.

We know that perception in the forms evident in the adult, is the outcome of a slow evolutionary process. There is an easy physiological explanation for the fact we have just quoted from the autobiography of Hemholz. Each visual stimulus leaves a corresponding imprint on the retina; naturally, the retinal image of a man standing nearby will be large, while a man standing on the belltower will produce a tiny image. The additional factor of lengthy experience and skill is needed in order for the small image of the remote man to be perceived as a large image, adjusted for distance. Such constancy in gauging the size of individual objects regardless of their remoteness – what is known as the “invariant” of perception – is elaborated by lengthy experience. The physiological imprint left on the retina by the perceived object still needs to be processed and assessed in the light of previous experience; the simple consequent image (Nachbild) must be collated with representations of the object left by previous experience (Vorstellungsbild), so that a person may become properly oriented in space, and not mistakenly assume that remote objects are small, and close objects, merely by virtue of their proximity, are big. The child still lacks this extremely important adaptive function. His experience is still so small that his vision functions in the most primitive manner. The child naively trusts the images received by his retina, and reaches out towards persons standing on a belltower, thinking they are dolls, or thinks that he can play with a little house on a knoll somewhere in the distance.

We have every reason to believe that the child perceives the world unstably and variably, and that a tiny change in the remoteness of an object (not to mention other factors) is sufficient for it to assume a totally different appearance in his eyes. It then becomes necessary, somehow, to adapt one’s perceptions to the changing external world, and to transfer those perceptions from the naïve-physiological phase to another in which prior experience would amend the image of the object received by the retina. We might say that our physiological perception has to some extent to be corrected, or “spoilt” by prior experience, so that the organism truly can make a successful adaptation to the conditions of the external world.

It is this task that is handled by a special mechanism of perception, named “eidetism” by certain new authors. [5] Each visually perceived object leaves some after-effect in the child. Some children possess the ability to see things with full clarity even after they have been removed from their field of vision; such individuals can, for example, describe all the details of a picture even after it is no longer before them. This is not the mere operation of memory: they really can see the image almost as clearly as if it were still in front of them, and they merely describe what is still before their eyes.

When such a mechanism becomes involved in perceptions it does, in a sense, correct the sensation received from outside. Not only does the child begin to see the external world with his eyes, as a perceptive and conducting apparatus; but, drawing on the whole of his previous experience, he somewhat alters the perceived objects. [6] A special type of perception is thus elaborated; and the undifferentiated world of purely physiological sensations is replaced by a world of “visual images”, perceived by the child with exceptional lucidity, in which external perceptions are mixed with and corrected by images remaining from previous experience. This is clearly what helps the child to transfer to the next phase of perception, in which, instead of unstable sensations subject to random influences, he will elaborate a stable, “invariant” picture of perceptions of the external world. Yet by helping the child cope with the random influences of external circumstances, this primitive mechanism of “visual images”, which is of immense biological significance, involves a substantial alteration of the whole of his psyche.

What the child had previously perceived as a flowing series of discrete and random fragments – something like the impression we get when looking at an unfamiliar map, walking along a street in a strange town, or looking at some new preparation – is now perceived as a series of integral pictures. Precisely by virtue of the “visual images” remaining in the child’s psyche, his previous experience mingles with current stimuli, and the world takes on an integral character.

This is not, however, done cheaply. Though he can now perceive the world integrally, the small child, at the same time, often loses the boundary between reality and fantasy, present and past, between that which exists and that which is merely desired. One researcher, Major, tried to set up special experiments aimed at clarifying these phenomena.[7] He gave colored pictures to some children of different ages and observed how they reacted. It appeared that the behavior of children at different stages of development will vary in such instances; three distinctive phases were evident in the attitude of the child to the image before him. To begin with, the child does not react to the picture as an image at all (first phase): treating it merely as a multi-colored piece of paper, he grabs it and tears it. After a while, however, comes the second phase, in which the above-mentioned mechanisms clearly begin to prevail: the child begins to perceive the shapes and colors on the paper as an image, and begins to relate to the things depicted on it as if they were real. He tries to seize them, and talk to them – in other words, he fails to distinguish at all between real things and their images. Not until much later does the child reach the third phase, when he begins to distinguish between real things and their images, and his attitude to both becomes sharply differentiated. This third phase, however, occurs quite late, and we may say that the psychic life of the child at the earliest phases in his development is characterized by manifestations similar to the fact stated here and attributable to the child’s continuing inability to differentiate discrete stimuli presented to him.

It should be noted that this phase of primitive perception of the world, driven by “visual images”, lasts for a long time. For a long time to come, the child continues to mix dreams with reality, and to produce exceptionally vivid fantasies which, in his mind, often take the place of reality.

This aspect of the primitive psyche is particularly evident in play. At one time or another, each of us has seen a small child nursing a stump of wood, fighting non-existent enemies or playing with make-believe friends – all with the utmost seriousness. No actor could possible perform these parts as convincingly as a child. He looks at the stump of wood, but perceives a doll; and he endows the most primitive objects with qualities dictated by his desires, experience or fantasy. For the child the primitive picture of the world is unquestionably one in which the boundaries between real perceptions and fantasies have been erased; a long time will be needed before these two facets become separated and cease mingling with one another.

There is a need for speech and thinking to develop, for the child’s reality-based experience to become strengthened and sufficiently autonomous, and also for those vivid “eidetic” visual images, that figure so prominently in the child’s psyche, to fade away; in other words, a great deal of cultural change has to take place, in order for the child to move out of the phase of primitive perception, into the next phase, that of full-fledged forms of adaptation to the external world.