The second round is the actual hiding. According the Bruner, there are four alternatives of who can do the initiation and who can do the hiding. Most of the time, at an early age, the mother is the one who initiates the game. Typically, the hiding lasts from two to seven seconds.
The third round is the uncovering and reappearance. As the baby grows older, she has more control of the unmasking. The fourth round is remaking contact. There is a release of tension at this point, often accompanied by laughter and smiling.
According to Piaget, a Swiss philosopher and psychologist, the infant needs to display object permanence; otherwise, the game will be a failure. The cognitive-developmental perspective explained how development is based upon active learning. When the mother first plays the game, the baby’s attention is held, and they want to know what will happen next. By keeping their attention in the game, they are learning more about object permanence. The game “may rest upon certain pre-adapted readiness to respond to disappearance and reappearance” (Piaget, 55). This allows the child to convert the procedures of the game into rules for the game. The child understands the concept of the game due to her “pre-adapted readiness,” and by repeated playing of the game, she can grow as an individual and begin creating new rules for play.
Piaget believed activities move more towards goal-directed behaviors as the child grows. As the baby gets older, she is either partially or fully in control of the unmasking, which is unlike the beginning where it was mostly the mother masking herself. The behavior is now in the form of reaching a goal: uncovering the mother or the baby.
Deferred imitation is another aspect of growth Piaget looked into. This is the ability to remember and copy the behaviors of models that are no longer present. For example, after the mother has left, it is possible that the baby will play with siblings.
Another way to teach a child is through guided participation. Upon uncovering during the game, mothers made vocalizations such as “hello” or “there’s Mommy.” This released tension and guided the baby into the expected behaviors of the game. The mother is also sensitive to the child’s limited attention span. The mother keeps the baby’s brain active by neither letting the child be too sure of the outcome nor leaving the range of possibilities too wide.
I believe that the methods taken by researchers were appropriate. There are drawbacks to whether you use a laboratory or a naturalistic setting. In a naturalistic setting, the game may not even occur because the experimenters have no control in the game-play. On the other hand, in a laboratory, it may seem unnatural to participants and possibly frightening to the child. In this case, the laboratory setting seems more appropriate because the researchers can control what happens by telling the mother what they would like to see.
The findings by the researchers seem convincing because at the age of the children during the study, they have already developed object permanence. Once this is formed, a baby can play Peek-a-boo. With nurturing attention and sensitivity from her parents, the baby can develop other rules from the basics of Peek-a-boo to guide her throughout infancy into childhood.
Bibliography
Bruner, J.S. Education of the Infant and Young Child. Book Publisher: New York Academic Press, 1970.
Piaget, Jean. Problèmes De Psychologie Génétique. [English
The child and reality; problems of genetic psychology]. Book Publisher: New York, Grossman Publishers, 1973.
Piaget, Jean. Répresentation de l'espace chez l'enfant. [English]
The child's conception of space] Book Publisher: New York, W. W. Norton, 1967.
