This is a study of the way in which twenty-five schizophrenic children under age twelve 'built up knowledge of the outside world and of themselves'. These children had an uncommon interest in exploring the surfaces of objects through sight, smell, touch, and taste. Their drawings, which contained gross distortions yet an unusual sensitivity to detail, suggested that the children approached objects as aggregates of details rather than as functional wholes. They apparently lacked the capacity to generalize from sensory experiences. Similarly, though the children remembered a large number of words, phrases, and sentences, they