Child Observation Essay

Object permanence is defined as “the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view.” (Siegler et al., 2017). There are many views that come with this topic, for instance Piaget, a psychologist, believed that for infants objects permanence is one of the most significant accomplishments. He emphasized this topic during his sensorimotor stage. Some infants grasp the concept quicker while others do not, but generally infants begin to develop the concept at around 8 months of age. A scientific article was done “to examine attentional predictors of search in 5-month-old infants (as measured by the looking A-not-B task), and whether levels of maternal education moderated the effect of the predictors” (Marcovitch et al., 2016).

For my study I took an 11 month infant male who was born December 21st, 2016. He was healthy and had no obvious sensory or motor impairments. I conducted five different tasks during the study; partial cover, complete cover, A-not-B task, visible displacement, and invisible displacement. The mother brought one of the infants toys that was attractive to the infant and was less then 2 inches in diameter. My first test was the partial cover. The mother sat with the infant on her lap on the floor. I sat on the opposite side and presented the infant with the toy. I got the infants attention and then covered it partially with a cloth. The infant immediately took the toy and knew it was underneath the cloth. During this task he had no issues with and retrieved the toy, I had repeated the task 2 more times and the results came back the same. The second task was the complete cover in which I placed the object on the floor and I covered it completely this time with a cloth. During this trial the infant started getting fussy and not interested as much. The first trial when I put the toy underneath

While observing this I was not sure if he knew the toy was underneath or if he just wanted to pull the cloth. I repeated the same task twice more and he was not interested anymore. He failed at finding the toy twice after the first trial. After this we gave him a little break because he started to get annoyed. The third trial I did was the A-not-B task which included two of the same cloths and a attractive toy. I got the infant interested in the toy and hid it under one of the covers. I repeated that three more times so the infant can see, and then I switched and placed the object under the other cloth. The infant was just giggling and laughing and started pulling both