Origins and Early Development of Human Body Knowledge

0.0

This Monograph examines the development of infants’and toddlers’ knowledge about human bodies. The conceptof the human body is highly complex and operates onseveral levels of knowing. We move our bodies and recognizesimilar movements in the bodies of others, we haveexpectations about how bodies are typically built, and wehave detailed knowledge about internal and external partsof the body and their functions. In the work presentedhere, the authors explore how these aspects of bodyknowledge originate in the first few years of life, and reporta series of studies that documents the development ofinfants’ and toddlers’ knowledge about the structure of thehuman body. Results from the studies indicate that infants’knowledge about the structure of the human body isinitially highly schematic, becoming more detailed andspecific in the second year of life.