Children’s perception is shaped by signifying types, not raw visual data

Evidence

Psychoanalysts following Freud who think that the mere discovery of the penis would be sufficient to produce a trauma seriously misunderstand the child’s mentality; it is much less rational than they seem to think, it does not establish clear-cut categories and is not bothered by contradictions. When the little girl seeing a penis declares, “I had one too” or “I’ll have one too,” or even “I have one too,” this is not a defense in bad faith; presence and absence are not mutually exclusive; the child—as his drawings prove—believes much less in what he sees with his eyes than in the signifying types that he has determined once and for all: he often draws without looking, and in any case he finds in his perceptions only what he puts there. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 687

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s account of consciousness and to structuralist signifier/signified thinking — the child perceives only what it already posits. — connects to: Category cues remain perceptually salient for race, age, and gender; Perception arrives pre-shaped by expectations and context, never raw — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 729; Social categorization dominates perception by selecting and interpreting sensory data — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 110 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Illuminates Beauvoir’s use of Piaget’s ‘thinking by participation’ and the artificialism concept central to child psychology.

Broader Connections

• Perception arrives pre-shaped by expectations and context, never raw #expands (0.92) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 729
• Category cues remain perceptually salient for race, age, and gender #corroborates (0.88)
• Social categorization dominates perception by selecting and interpreting sensory data #corroborates (0.85) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 110
• Attention constitutes reality differently for different perceivers #expands (0.80)