Peekaboo (also spelled peek-a-boo) is a form of play played with an
infant. To play, one player hides their face, pops back into the view of the other, and says Peekaboo!, sometimes followed by I see you! There are many variations: for example, where trees are involved, "Hiding behind that tree!" is sometimes added. Another variation involves saying "Where's the baby?" while the face is covered and "There's the baby!" when uncovering the face.
Peekaboo uses the fundamental structure of all good jokes—surprise, balanced with expectation.[1]
Linguist Iris Nomikou has compared the game to a dialogue given the predictable back-and-forth pattern.[2] Other researchers have called the game “protoconversation" – a way to teach an infant the timing and the structure of social exchanges.[3]
Object permanence
Peekaboo is thought by
developmental psychologists to demonstrate an infant's inability to understand
object permanence.[5] Object permanence is an important stage of
cognitive development for infants. In early sensorimotor stages, the infant is completely unable to comprehend object permanence. Psychologist
Jean Piaget conducted experiments with infants which led him to conclude that this awareness was typically achieved at eight to nine months of age.[6] He said that infants before this age are too young to understand object permanence. A lack of object permanence can lead to
A-not-B errors, where children reach for a thing at a place where it should not be.
See also
Look up peekaboo in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
^Mayers, David (2011). Exploring Psychology. New York, NY: Worth.
ISBN978-1-4292-1635-7.
^Wellman, Henry M.; et al. (1986), "Infant Search and Object Permanence: A Meta-Analysis of the A-Not-B Error.", Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 51 (3): i-67,
doi:
10.2307/1166103,
JSTOR1166103,
PMID3683418
Further reading
Bruner, J. S. & Sherwood, V. (1976). "Peek-a-boo and the learning of rule structures". In Bruner, J.; Jolly, A. & Sylva, K. (eds.). Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution. Middlesex: Penguin. pp. 277–287.
ISBN0-14-081126-5.