The Construction of Reality in the Child

Piaget argues that the child's concepts of object, space, causality, and time are not innate or given through perception alone but are actively constructed through the progressive coordination of sensorimotor schemata. He rejects the empiricist assumption that reality is simply copied from the environment, and equally rejects nativist preformationism. The book's introduction states that the study of sensorimotor intelligence has taught how the child first directly assimilates the external environment to his own activity, then forms increasingly mobile schemata that intercoordinate . A 1955 review in the Journal of Consulting Psychology noted that Piaget raises the question of how the child comes to "know" his universe in the sense of attaining concepts of objects, space, time, and causality .

The book traces the development of the object concept through six stages, from the infant's initial failure to respond to vanished objects, through the beginning of permanence by prolonging accommodation movements, to the final stage where the child can represent invisible displacements. A parallel analysis covers the elaboration of spatial "groups" of displacements, the development of causality from magical-phenomenalist to objective forms, and the construction of temporal series. The framework of object permanence remains a foundational concept in developmental psychology and is used in contemporary research on infant cognition, though the precise timing of its emergence is debated, with some researchers arguing that looking-time paradigms reveal earlier sensitivity to object persistence than Piaget's manual-search tasks indicated.

The Construction of Reality in the Child is the second of three volumes that Piaget described as forming a single project on the beginnings of intelligence. The first volume, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, analyzed how sensorimotor schemata develop and intercoordinate. This second volume examines the complementary development: how the external universe becomes elaborated into a stable world of objects, space, causality, and time. Piaget states in the introduction that the study of the second aspect is inseparable from the first, since object and causality are nothing other than accommodation to the reality of the schematism of assimilation . The third volume, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, then analyzes imitation and representational symbolism.

Reviewers consistently praised the extraordinary care of Piaget's observations and his ingenuity in organizing and interpreting them. A 1955 review in the Journal of Consulting Psychology described the volume as "one more testimonial to the author's care in making observations and to his ingenuity in organizing and interpreting them," adding that no psychologist interested in behavior development could help being stimulated by the reported observations . The review also suggested that many readers would sense a need for rethinking dynamic hypotheses regarding infancy based on Piaget's conceptualization . The book's detailed stage-by-stage account of how the object concept emerges from the coordination of visual, auditory, and prehensile schemata remains a model of developmental observation.

A comparative analysis notes that just as the Freudian child, after the auto-erotic stage, makes an external object the center of love, so the Piagetian child makes an external object the center of activity. In his analysis of the development of causality as a supplement to the object concept, Piaget shows how the child, for whom at first there is no causality other than his own actions, learns to understand cause-effect relationships between objects independent of the subject . Both Freud and Piaget show how the self is gradually dissociated from the non-self, but Piaget's exposition is an interpretation of ego-psychology while Freud's is of the unconscious, forming a supplement to Freud's theories .

The title suggests a study of how children generally understand reality, potentially leading readers to expect coverage of older children's conceptual development or philosophical realism. In fact, the book is specifically about the sensorimotor period—the first two years of life—and the construction of the object concept, practical space, causality, and time before language and representation. A contemporary scholarly interpretation argues that Piaget's categories of learning are related to objects and things to a much greater extent than previously assumed, connecting his work to philosophical realism rather than the subjective idealism sometimes attributed to constructivism . The book is not a treatise on epistemology in general but a detailed empirical study of infancy's foundational achievements.