The Development of Object Permanence

The Development of Object Permanence

I never realized when I played Peek-A-Boo with different infants in my family, that I was teaching them one of the most valuable lessons in their life. I just thought it was a game that infants liked to play and it made them laugh. I didn’t know that this was so funny to them because they were fascinated with the fact that for one moment I wasn’t there and a moment later I popped back up. Little did I know I was teaching them one of their most important accomplishments.

Adults and older children never give a second thought to the fact that when something disappears out of sight that it still exists. It never crosses our minds to think about when exactly did the ability to “just know”develop. If something ceases to exist that was once right in someone’s hand right before our eyes we think we must be at a magic show. However, people don’t know that when they were an infant they had to develop the knowledge that when you don’t see something it still exists on earth. Technically, infants must be looking at a magic show everyday for months.

Piaget coined the term object permanence in 1954 to describe the understanding that objects continue to exist, even when they cannot be directly seen, heard or touched. While conducting an experiment on his son as Piaget often did he found that his son did not reach for a toy that he had hidden with a cover. Piaget took that to mean that his son must not know that they toy exists anymore. When Piaget started these experiments to test this phenomenon light bulbs lit up in the heads of developmental psychologists around the world as they probably said to themselves,”I never thought about that before”. Since the emergence of the idea of object permanence many psychologists have conducted experiments to either prove or disprove Piaget’s theory. Experiments to test the development of this phenomenon have been conducted for decades and continue to be a topic that many developmental psychologists study.

In his book written in 1954 Piaget stated that “for young infants objects are not permanent entities that exist continuously in time but instead are transient entities that cease to exist when they are no longer visible and begin to exist anew when they come back into view.” He proposed the notion that infants do not begin to understand the object of object p...

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...d they continue to hear it for years to come. However, that still doesn’t explain to me why infants find the game of Peek-A-Boo so amusing. After all this research I’m starting to think that they laugh and say to themselves inside their heads, “look a this fool, she thinks I don’t know she’s there when she covers her face. What a joke she is.”

References

Baillargeon, R. (1994). How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 3, 133-140.

Baillergeon, R., Spelke, E., & Wasserman, S. (Aug, 1985). Object permanence in five-month-old infants. Cognition, 20(3), 191-208.

Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in 3.5 and 4.5-month-old infants: further evidence. Child Development, 62, 1227-1246.

Baillargeon, R., & Graber, M. (1987). Where’s the rabbit? 5.5 month-old infants’ representation of the height of a hidden object. Cognitive Development, 2, 375-392.

Jonsson, B., & von Hofsten, C. (2003). Infants’ ability to track and reach for temporary occluded objects. Developmental Science, 6(1), 86-99.

Siegler, R., & Alibali, M. (2005). Children’s Thinking Fourth Edition. Prentice Hall Inc. Upper Saddle River NJ.