Object permanence

Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight. It develops in infancy and supports searching for hidden objects.

A-not-B error: An infant error in which a hidden object is repeatedly searched for at its old location rather than its newly indicated location. The error shows that successful searching depends on more than knowing an object still exists.
Jean Piaget: A Swiss developmental psychologist who proposed influential stage-based accounts of children's cognitive development. Piaget's observations made object permanence a landmark topic in developmental psychology.
Core knowledge: The proposal that humans possess early, specialized systems for reasoning about basic domains such as objects and agents. It treats early object expectations as evidence of knowledge before deliberate search develops.
Peekaboo: A social game in which a person alternates between appearing and disappearing from view. The game repeatedly makes disappearance and return salient during infancy.
Violation-of-expectation paradigm: An experimental method that infers expectations from how long subjects look at events that violate them. Researchers use longer looking at impossible hidden-object events to test infants’ expectations.
Sensorimotor stage: Piaget's first stage of cognitive development, in which infants learn through sensation and action. Piaget placed the emergence of object permanence within this stage.
Constructivism: The view that knowledge is actively built through interactions between an organism and its environment. Piaget's account presents object permanence as constructed through sensorimotor experience.
Separation anxiety: Distress caused by separation from a familiar caregiver or attachment figure. A caregiver's continued existence despite being absent is relevant to how separation is understood.
Infant reaching: The development of infants’ deliberate arm and hand movements toward objects. Reaching for a hidden object provides a direct measure of object-directed search.
Baillargeon drawbridge experiment: A 1985 infant study in which looking times suggested expectations about a hidden object’s continued presence. This study challenged Piaget's estimate of when infants understand hidden objects.

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