The human universe is composed of two kinds of things: physical realities, which are beyond our knowledge as to the things themselves, and symbols, which are created anew in every human as ontogenetic knowledge through processes attendant on our living in groups and interacting with other humans.

As to the first: this is the realm of science, where we construct conceptions of correspondences among our perceptions of regularities in interactions with the things of our universe. Beginning from our individual actions on the world which are followed by perceived regularities of their sequelae, we look for regularities that enable us to act subsequently with anticipation of outcomes hopefully similar to those which followed previous similar actions. This is the ground of the conjecture of cause and effect. WE are the cause. The effect is what we hope the action will bring about in the world. The inherent intention is to control our environment. The need is to enable survival. We are, among other things, predators living in a universe of predators.
As to the value of these actions: they are valuable if they serve our ends, all those desiderata subsequent to survival, however the outcomes are perceived individually; in the middle of things, they are interesting if and only if they impel us to seek / hope for expanded control of our environment. Actions of less value are of various sorts: ineffective, contrary, incomprehensible.

As to the second: regardless of perceptual modality, symbols are internal tokens the indivual adopts indicative of reference to other things, whether they be physical or symbolic.
What the Infant Peggy Study aims to provide is an extensive corpus of behaviors of one child, situated in her natural environement, considered as the suite of her contexts involving the entireties of both her physical and symbolic experiences.

The weekly video clips of her actions in a variety of her behavior settings,
– selected by her parents and including them, her siblings and pet dog,
– primarily in the family home over four years of regular recordings (and extended less regularly before and after to a total of six years),
– as they are unpacked and interpreted,
comprise a unique observational and investigative resource for understanding the self construction in an individual’s mind of her grasp of physical realities and her suite of observable and sharable representations.

As to the observable representations, these are an Analysts’ constructed articulations of what he understands her grasps of realities are, as indicated by her actions. These representations are intended to be sharable with a community of peers who will be able to comprehend, to criticize and hopefully to improve them.
As to the infant’s sharable representations, these are intended to share an Analyst’s similar understanding of both the infant’s interprertation of and production of communicative acts in linguistic and other modalities. That is, to the extent that IPS involves a language development study, it is set in the broader context of communication behavior as captured in the video clips of the first four years of the child’s life within her nuclear family.

Tracing the development of these representations is studying how we perceive and appreciate ways humans come to understand our world and to think, to learn, and to share our knowledge.