object permanence: a standalone construct

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget introduced object permanence in his 1936 study of infancy (translated into English in 1954 as The Construction of Reality in the Child), defining it as the child's growing understanding that an object continues to exist even when it cannot be seen, heard, or touched. Piaget concluded from watching infants fail to search for hidden objects that this understanding is not present at birth but is built up gradually across the first two years of life, and he tied its emergence to the point at which a child will actively retrieve a toy after watching it be covered. Later work revised his timeline: Renée Baillargeon, Elizabeth Spelke, and Stanley Wasserman (1985) reported that infants as young as five months looked reliably longer at physically impossible events involving a hidden object, which they read as evidence that some expectation of an object's continued existence appears well before an infant can manually search for it. What makes object permanence a landmark construct is that it names one of the earliest measurable achievements in human cognition, the recognition that the world is made of enduring objects that persist independently of the observer, and it anchors a large body of research on how infants come to represent things they cannot perceive.[1][2]

Unit

A developmental capacity of the individual child, treated as present, partial, or absent

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed originally through manual search tasks (retrieving a hidden object, and the A-not-B error) and later through violation-of-expectation designs that compare looking times to possible versus impossible hidden-object events