Object permanence

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Object permanence is the term used to describe the awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible.

Jean Piaget conducted experiments with infants which led him to conclude that this awareness was typically achieved at eight to nine months of age, during the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. Such experiments consisted of behavioral tests with infant subjects. The infant would be shown a desirable object or toy, for example, and the toy would then be covered by a blanket or otherwise obscured from view while the infant was watching. Some of the infant subjects would immediately exhibit signs of confusion or dismay. Piaget interpreted these behavioral signs as evidence of a belief that the object had somehow 'vanished' or simply ceased to exist.

Piaget concluded that some infants were too young to understand object permanence, which would tend to explain why they do not cry when their mothers were gone ("out of sight, out of mind").^[1] A lack of object permanence can lead to A-not-B errors, where children reach for a thing at a place where it should not be.

In more recent years, the original Piagetian object permanence account has been challenged by a series of infant studies suggesting that much younger infants do have a clear sense of objects persisting when out of sight. One example of an experiment that contradicts the Piagetian perceptions on this is the Bower and Wishart 1972 experiment where a child still groped for a teddy bear, even in total darkness. The inconsistencies in the experimental results and the underlying hypotheses may hinge on the mechanism used to obscure the test objects. For example, infants may simply have a better general understanding of the obscuring effects caused by changes in light.

Studies using the habituation method from the Baillargeon lab have shown that infants as young as 3 months know that an object continues to exist behind a screen even if they cannot demonstrate their knowledge in their behavior.