Object Permanence

Object permanence is the development of awareness that objects are separate entities that continue to exist even when one has no perceptual contact with them. Furthermore, it is the ability to retain and utilize visual images or form primitive mental images. Educational psychologists are interested in object permanence because it is seen as a developmental milestone and a significant cognitive shift. The theorist Jean Piaget introduced the concept of object permanence and its development in infants. Since his introduction of the concept around 1952, others have conducted tests to prove or disprove the notion.

Piaget proposed that infants achieve object permanence in stages during the sensorimotor period of development. This period of development has been divided into six substages. In substages 1 and 2, the first few months of life, if an infant is presented with an object and the object disappears, the infant does not search for it. In other words, the infant assumes the object no longer exists, following the rule, “out of sight, out of mind.” Substage 3 (4–8 months) marks the beginning of the infant's ability to distinguish between self and others. At this stage, the infant will search for an object when it disappears if he or she were doing something with the object when it disappeared or if the object is only partially hidden from view. At this point, the infant may still think of the object in terms of his or her own actions on the object. However, when looking for the object, the infant does not usually persist in the task. As the infant starts to show clear acts of intelligence in the fourth substage, around 8–12 months, he or she will look for a fully occluded object, showing that objects now have a quality of permanence for the child. This is the point when the infant's schemes are coordinated and he or she has the skills to look for hidden objects. The infant may anticipate people and objects.

During substage 5, from 12–18 months, the child may begin to pay attention to the ways new objects or events differ from his or her present mental constructs. This is a period of discovering new means through active experimentation. This leads to the advance that children can now find an object that was hidden, exposed, and hidden again, but only if they are shown before hiding. The final substage of this developmental period occurs from around 18–24 months. At this time, a child no longer has to experiment with objects themselves and is no longer dependent on seeing or acting on the object, but instead can represent and operate on the object mentally. At this stage, the child can retrieve objects hidden in a secondary box even when he or she did not see the item moved from the original box to the other. Piaget proposed that these stages occur in order, are progressive, and are dependent on the age of the child.

Piaget conducted his experiments with infants and concluded that object permanence is achieved around eight months of age. Outward signs that an infant has achieved this developmental milestone include the exhibition of signs of separation anxiety from the primary caregiver, stranger anxiety, and delight in the game of peek-a-boo.

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