Object Permanence After a 24-Hr Delay and Leaving the Locale of Disappearance: The Role of Memory, Space, and Identity.

Abstract

Fourteen-month-old infants saw an object hidden inside a container and were removed from the disappearance locale for 24 hr. Upon their return, they searched correctly for the hidden object, demonstrating object permanence and long-term memory. Control infants who saw no disappearance did not search. In Experiment 2, infants returned to see the container either in the same or a different room. Performance by room-change infants dropped to baseline levels, suggesting that infant search for hidden objects is guided by numerical identity. Infants seek the individual object that disappeared, which exists in its original location, not in a different room. A new behavior, identity-verifying search, was discovered and quantified. Implications are drawn for memory, spatial understanding, object permanence, and object identity.

Learning about occlusion: Initial assumptions and rapid adjustments

“…This is the first study that demonstrates such rapid learning effects during an occlusion task. Experiment 2 replicates these effects and demonstrates a robust memory effect extending 24 h. In occlusion tasks such long-term memory effects have previously only been observed in 14-month-old infants (Moore & Meltzoff, 2004).…”

“…This effect is quite remarkable given the massive flow of visual information that infants are bombarded with during the 24 h in between the second and third session. In the occlusion paradigm such learning effects, extending over 24 h, have only been reported for 14-month-old infants (Moore & Meltzoff, 2004). …”

“…These early reports demonstrate that there are at least two different ways in which infants can predict the reappearing object; infants can either extrapolate the pre-occlusion trajectory or base their predictions on recent experiences accumulated over successive trials. Subsequent studies of infants' representational abilities have continued to investigate these two modes of prediction (Gredebäck & von Hofsten, 2004;Johnson, Amso, & Slemmer, 2003;Moore & Meltzoff, 2004;Rosander & von Hofsten, 2004;Spelke et al, 1992;von Hofsten, Feng, & Spelke, 2000).…”

“…Among others, Moore and Meltzoff (2004) demonstrated that 14-month-olds could represent the location of a hidden toy and retain this information over a 24-h period; recovering the toy from the correct location as they came back to the lab on the following day. Furthermore, (Johnson et al, 2003) provided evidence that 4-month-old infants improved their performance on an occlusion task if they were trained with fully visible trajectories.…”

The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent

“…Infants have goals and act intentionally. Indeed in the second half-year of life they become obsessed with the success and failure of their plans (e.g., Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986Moore & Meltzoff, 2004). They repeatedly test their own plans, explore why they failed, and systematically alter the means as if experimenting with various ways of achieving the same goal.…”