In its brief history, cognitive developmental science has offered two seemingly contradictory pictures of the way children think about the nature of the world. Early portraits posed children as primitive, magical thinkers, fundamentally confused about the nature of reality. The current fashion, however, is to present even young children as sciencelike theorists, sorting reality into different kinds and causes.

Contemporary researchers have sought to replace the old picture with the new one, complaining that the earlier depiction fails to do justice to reality. Piaget's early work is particularly criticized as suffering from poor technique. His questions are said to be too abstract, the subject matter too unfamiliar, and the coding too inadequate to capture the richness of children's early intuitive understanding (see Wellman, 1990).