Peekaboo (also spelled peek-a-boo) is a form of play played with an

infant An infant or baby is the very young offspring of human beings. ''Infant'' (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'unable to speak' or 'speechless') is a formal or specialised synonym for the common term ''baby''. The terms may also be used to ...

. To play, one player hides their face, pops back into the view of the other, and says ''Peekaboo!'', sometimes followed by ''I see you!'' There are many variations: for example, where trees are involved, "Hiding behind that tree!" is sometimes added. Another variation involves saying "Where's the baby?" while the face is covered and "There's the baby!" when uncovering the face. Peekaboo uses the fundamental structure of all good jokes—surprise, balanced with expectation. Peekaboo is thought by

developmental psychologists Development of the human body is the process of growth to maturity. The process begins with fertilization, where an egg released from the ovary of a female is penetrated by a sperm cell from a male. The resulting zygote develops through mit ...

to demonstrate an infant's inability to understand

object permanence Object permanence is the understanding that Physical object, objects continue to Existence, exist even when they cannot be Sense, sensed. This is a fundamental concept studied in the field of developmental psychology, the subfield of psychology ...

. Object permanence is an important stage of

cognitive development Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult bra ...

for infants. In early sensorimotor stages, the infant is completely unable to comprehend object permanence. Psychologist

Jean Piaget Jean William Fritz Piaget (, , ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called " genetic epistemolog ...

conducted experiments with infants which led him to conclude that this awareness was typically achieved at eight to nine months of age. He claimed that infants before this age are too young to understand object permanence. A lack of object permanence can lead to

A-not-B error The A-not-B error is an incomplete or absent schema of object permanence, normally observed during the sensorimotor stage of Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development. A typical A-not-B task goes like this: An experimenter hides an attractive ...

s, where children reach for a thing at a place where it should not be. Linguist Iris Nomikou has compared the game to a dialogue given the predictable back-and-forth pattern. Other researchers have called the game “protoconversation" – a way to teach an infant the timing and the structure of social exchanges.

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