Abstract
Object permanence has been investigated with a variety of paradigms and measures, yielding heterogeneous findings. The current study employed a novel Violation-of-Expectation paradigm measuring pupil dilation as indicator of cognitive effort and surprise. Across repeated trials, infants watched videos of animated toys either stopping in an open door frame or moving across the open door frame off screen. The door then closed and opened up again to reveal either the toy, or an empty space. In Experiment 1, 18-month-olds’s pupils dilated in response to the unexpected empty outcome more than to the expected empty outcome, establishing the paradigm as a suitable measure of violation of object expectation. Using the same paradigm, Experiment 2 revealed an absence of this object expectation effect for 10-month-olds. Results are discussed with regard to paradigmatic aspects and developmental differences. It is suggested that young infants do not automatically represent occluded objects upon perceiving occlusion events, and that occlusion events may initially require relevance in terms of individual activity or social interaction.
Highlights
Object permanence, the ability to represent an object’s continued existence when it is not visible [1] has been the focus of cognitive development research for many decades
A priori analyses of the baseline revealed that there was no difference in pupil dilation between the two types of manipulation at baseline (Mocclusion = 4.83mm, SDocclusion = .546 mm, Mremoval = 4.87mm, SDremoval = .527mm, t(28) = .832, p = .416)
The pattern of findings supports an interpretation in terms of object permanence and provides confirmatory evidence to the established view of object representations in the second year of life
Summary
The ability to represent an object’s continued existence when it is not visible [1] has been the focus of cognitive development research for many decades. Regarding the classic ‘drawbridge’ VoE looking-time paradigm [9] it has been argued that infants may look longer at the impossible test event in which an occluder flips backwards in an 180 ̊ arc despite an object standing in its way, because of a preference for some general inherent perceptual properties of the stimuli rather than an object expectations [18, 19]. In accordance with the perceptual interpretation of their looking time results, the authors did not find a selective effect of pupil dilation for the conditions which should violate cognitive expectations These findings shed doubts on the robustness of VoE effects of object permanence at 10 months of age. In Study 2, we moved on to our target age group of 10-month-olds for whom findings of object permanence are more heterogeneous
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