In this volume, the world's foremost cognitive psychologist turns his attention to the development of the child's awareness of his own action. The book reports the results of experimentation conducted at the world-famed Center of Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, to distinguish between the child's ability to perform the actions required by a simple task and the child's understanding of the rationale behind the action. Children, ranging in age between four and adolescence, were asked to perform such tasks as walking on all fours, playing tiddlywinks, building a ramp for a toy car. They were then asked to explain how they had performed the task and in some cases to instruct the interviewer. Their answers show a number of surprising inaccuracies in the child's ability to grasp the nature of what he had done. Taking a broad view of his results, Piaget shows that they reveal several stages in the slow and gradual development of the child's conceptualization of his actions. In analyzing each stage, Piaget argues that the child's concept of his own action cannot be considered a simple matter of "enlightenment," but must be actively reconstructed from his experience. This view has always been at the core of Piaget's work, and it is here extended into an interesting new area of the child's mental world.-- Book Jacket.