Piaget Object Permanence

Tifany Tran
10/2/15
Out of sight, but NOT out of mind
The central issue of the article is about the study of object permanence in infants by Jean Piaget. Object permanence is the idea that things continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. When Piaget worked at the Alfred Binet Laboratory, he was interested in seeing how infants of the same ages made similar errors in the experiment. He concluded that older children think differently and learn more comparing to younger ones. Piaget proposed that throughout childhood, individuals move from the four stages of cognitive development in chronological order and at about the same ages. Furthermore, he argued that object permanence is an important concept because infants cannot solve problem and develop inner thoughts without it.
Piaget used the unstructured evaluation methods to study object permanence by playing games with his three children. He classified the six stages to the development of

object permanence through the observations and errors that his children made during the games. Stage one is from birth to one month in which the baby learns about his/her body. This stage is mostly involved with reflexes such as feeding and touching, and the infants still do not have object permanence. During stage two (1 to 4 months), infants follow objects with their eyes, and they tend to repeated some actions from their bodies known as primary circular reactions. When the infants do not see the object, they turn to look at another object. In fact, the infants will look at the object longer when the repeated object appears in the same location. This behavior is known as passive expectation. In the experiment, Piaget appears and disappears in front of Laurent, and he watches as he expects his father to reappear. Object permanence is not found at this stage because if it was the case, Laurent would have search for his missing father rather focusing on another object. In stage three (4 to 10 months), Piaget gives Lucienne a celluloid goose, and she would immediately grasp and play with it. When Piaget covers the goose completely, she stops searching for it. However, she would grasp the goose when her father did not cover its beak. During this stage, the infants reach for an object that is not completely hidden, but object permanence is not completely formed. According to Piaget (1954), “To the child at this stage, the object does not have an independent existence but is tied to the child’s own actions and sensory perceptions” (p. 138).
In stage four (10 to 12 months), children will continue to search for objects that are out of sight. They also understand the concept that object continue to exist even when they are hidden from view. However, object permanence is not fully developed because children do not understand visible displacements. In the experiment, Piaget took the parrot from Jacqueline and hid it on the left side of the mattress (call this place A).He hid it twice, and she found the parrot. When her father took the parrot and hid it on the right side of the mattress (call this place B), she would still look for the parrot where it was previously found. This error is known as the A-not-B effect. According to Piaget, the object concept is not a permanent and separate idea to children at this stage. In stage five (12 to 18 months), children have the ability to find the object where it was hidden from view without any problem. Nevertheless, children still do not fully understand the object permanence concept because they lack the ability to understand invisible displacement. In the experiment, Jacqueline was playing with a potato and a box. As Jacqueline watches, Piaget took the potato and put it in the box. Then, he puts the box upside down under the rug. When Piaget took out the empty box and asked about the potato, Jacqueline did not know where to find the potato. During stage six (18 to 24 months), the concept of object permanence is finally developed. In the experiment, Piaget puts a pencil in a box and wraps it with different things. However, Jacqueline was able to open the box to find the pencil.
Generally speaking, Piaget believed that object permanence is an importance cognitive skill that prepares an infant to move on to the preoperational stage which allows a child to use symbols to solve problems.

The result also shows that the six stages of object permanence apply to all the children around the world disregarding their cultural backgrounds. Piaget also stated that all infants must pass each state in chronological order before they can move on to the next stage. The ages identified with each stage are estimation because it was difficult to predict age ranges accurately since only three children participated in the study. In fact, the changes between each stage develop over time, and the errors that children often made decrease over time as they became more intellectually mature. It is very normal for children to acquire certain behaviors from the previous and later stages at the same time. In addition, the behaviors in the previous stages do not completely vanish as the child moves on to a different

stage.
Furthermore, the Piaget study is an importance research because he changed the way how people view children. Before Piaget’s study, people would probably think that adults are capable thinkers comparing to children. However, Piaget shows that children think differently than adults. Even though his research was criticized by others, it also inspired many people to study more about the cognitive development. For example,
In his study, Piaget used the unstructured evaluation methods to study object permanence. He also used his three children as the study subjects. I do not like his method because the result can be bias, unreliable, and invalid. Three infants with different age ranges are not enough to show the consistency in the result of the study. Therefore, more infants with different age ranges should be used to conduct the study. The findings enlighten future research in psychology about methods of education and styles of parenting. The finding can be related to my everyday life because new babies are born every day, and it is important to see how they develop throughout the different stages. Furthermore, object permanence helps individuals understand that objects that they may have never seen in their lives actually do exist.