A Life Span Approach to Object Permanence

Abstract

The development of the concept of object permanence is traced in infants, children, and adults. In infancy, this development takes the form of a gradual change in understanding of objects’ identity parameters – the cues that, if altered, lead to a sense that the object’s identity has changed. Studies are reviewed which suggest that by 2 years of age, children have a full understanding of the identity parameters of physical objects. Among older children and adults, the development of object permanence has been studied in two respects – (a) studies of pathological distortions in the understanding of permanence parameters, and (b) studies of the conditions under which notions of object permanence can be destroyed. Attention is focused on the second line of studies, particularly those in which the phenomenon of an object’s nonpermanence is demonstrated to preschoolers and to adults. Under two conditions, children and adults alike evidence belief that an object can spontaneously turn into something else, that a physical object can be created ‘from nothing’, and that a physical object can disappear. These results suggest that the concept of object permanence, even in the case of physical objects, is not attained in some final form by the age of 2.