Juan Gomez, primatologist and Piagetian, covers the standard milestones of intelligence in explaining the development of the child's mind. An opening essay, covering about a third of the book, introduces the primate group, their distinctive features (including the hand), human nepotism, perception of objects and Piaget's sensory-motor intelligence.
The work of Fantz and Kohler has seldom received the nice treatment given here. Fantz was a pioneer of object perception, Kohler, of object manipulation. The first to systematically measure the looking behavior of human, chimpanzee and monkey infants, Fantz found that all three species showed an early predilection for visual complexity. The simple preference for patterns in the new-born became a preference, in the two-month-old, for three-dimensional stimuli with complex surface patterns characteristic of objects. Only in those infants that were deprived of visual stimuli (chimpanzee and monkey), was preference for object-like stimuli delayed, or even eliminated. An equally well-rounded discussion of Kohler demonstrates, among other things, that Kohler recognizedindeed clarified-chimpanzee intelligence without confusing it with that of humans, a rare gift in primatologists.
Jarring omissions mar the remaining two-thirds of the book. Modules-the learning devices that guide the child's acquisition of all the key competences of the species: language, number, etc, arguably the major achievement of the past 25 years in developmental psychology-are not mentioned. No mention either of the two representations of numerosity: one, analogue, found in virtually all species; the other, digital, confined to humans, and their distinctive brain locations (Dehaene and others). Nothing but silence concerning the music module. The author strolls through suggestive work while ignoring the definitive work of Chen, Huttenlocher, Gallistel, Spelke, etc. Among the intriguing findings ignored is this: a child's spatial competence, before the acquisition of language, is not different from that of a rat! But the grand sin of omission lies in ignoring the infant's precocious expectations of the defining characteristics of objects, the physical module (Spelke, Baillargeon, and others). Two-and-a half month old infants recognize that an object-