Article1991

Object Permanence in Young Infants: Further Evidence

500 citations0/0 files storedChild Development

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Child and Animal Learning Development Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills Developmental and Educational Neuropsychology

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that 4.5- and even 3.5-month-old infants realize that objects continue to exist when hidden. The goal of the present experiments was to obtain converging evidence of object permanence in young infants. Experiments were conducted using paradigms previously used to demonstrate object permanence in 5.5-month-old infants and 6.5-month-old infants. In one experiment, 3.5-month-old infants watched a short or a tall carrot slide along a track. The track's center was hidden by a screen with a large window in its upper half. The short carrot was shorter than the window's lower edge and so did not appear in the window when passing behind the screen; the tall carrot was taller than the window's lower edge and hence should have appeared in the window but did not. The infants looked reliably longer at the tall than at the short carrot event, suggesting that they (a) represented the existence, height, and trajectory of each carrot behind the screen and (b) expected the tall carrot to appear in the screen window and were surprised that it did not. Control trials supported this interpretation. In another experiment, 4.0-month-old infants saw a toy car roll along a track that was partly hidden by a screen. A large toy mouse was placed behind the screen, either on top or in back of the track. The female infants looked reliably longer when the mouse stood on top as opposed to in back of the track, suggesting that they (a) represented the existence and trajectory of the car behind the screen, (b) represented the existence and location of the mouse behind the screen, and (c) were surprised to see the car reappear from behind the screen when the mouse stood in its path. A second experiment supported this interpretation. The results of these experiments provide further evidence that infants aged 3.5 months and older are able to represent and to reason about hidden objects.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 500 citations exist upstream.

References

1954The construction of reality in the child.1985Object permanence in five-month-old infants 1987Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants.1985Development of the Ability to Use Recall to Guide Action, as Indicated by Infants' Performance on AB

Cited by

1997A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influence 2005Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict 1999Knowing in the context of acting: The task dynamics of the A-not-B error.1997Rethinking infant knowledge: Toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence tasks.1999Early noun vocabularies: do ontology, category structure and syntax correspond?1998Who put the cog in infant cognition? Is rich interpretation too costly?2001Infants' knowledge of objects: beyond object files and object tracking 2012The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.