The Baby Laughter Project, which has surveyed parents from more than 20 countries, has shown that games like peek-a-boo are perfect for showing one such fundamental development - object permanence.
The person who most greatly influenced our current view of childhood development was Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In the earliest months of life, Piaget said that babies are only able to learn about the world by directly interacting with it through grasping, shaking and sucking. With each experience, he concluded, children gradually build up a picture of how the world works - a kind of naïve physics.
Dr Addyman has collected nearly 700 questionnaires about baby smiles and laughter from around the world. "Laughter and smiles start incredibly early, just like tears," says Dr Caspar Addyman, a baby laughter researcher at Birkbeck College in London. Dr Addyman thinks that studying babies' laughter can be just as effective at helping us pinpoint developments in the way their minds are expanding. "You can't laugh at something until you get the joke, so what they laugh at really tells us about their understanding of the world," says Addyman.
Peek-a-boo: A window on baby's brain By Anna Lacey BBC Health Check 19 October 2013
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