What do recent studies add to Piaget's 'object permanence'?

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What do recent studies add to Piaget's 'object permanence'?

The work of Jean Piaget and the development of his sensori-motor intelligence stage theory (1952, 1954) is said to have initiated a great deal of research within the area of cognitive development in infancy. Piaget believed that the infant was born without an intellectual structure,but possessed the innate ability to react with the world in quite specific ways in order to allow the infant to construct an understanding of it. His theory was based on the biological concept of adaptation, the notion that organisms are continually changing to adapt with their environment. Piaget believed that infants learned about the world through assimilation and accommodation , which basically means that when an infant encounters a new object or event it attempts to fit it into existing actions or schema's, this is known as accommodation. However if this new object or event will not automatically slot into existing schema's then a modification of internal structures has to occur in order to incorporate this new structure, Piaget refers to this change as accommodation. It is through this process that Piaget believes infants gain their knowledge of object permanence.

Piaget (1954) claims that very young infants lack the mental ability to distinguish between their actions on an object and the existence of the object itself. According to Piaget, once an object is out of sight it fails to exist as far as the infant is concerned, as the saying goes 'out of sight is out of mind.' It's not until the infant develops the mental capacity to make the distinction between an object and oneself that they understand that an object may continue to exist even when it's no longer to be seen.

For Piaget, the acquisition of object permanence is signified when the infant searches for, and retrieves an hidden object. Piaget claimed that infants do not demonstrate this ability until they have reached stage iv of his six stage sensori-motor period, at around 9 months of age. Prior to this Piaget says,infants do not search for hidden objects, even when the object has been hidden in full view. Piaget (1954) demonstrated this phenomena by placing an attractive toy under a cloth whilst the infant was watching, stage iii infants made no attempt to uncover the toy and grasp it even though they possess the ability to perform such actions, Piaget claimed that it is not until the beginning of stage iv, that infants will successfully uncover and retrieve hidden objects. Piaget interpreted this behaviour to be an indication that the infant had, not only developed the ability to combine two action schemes, but also this coordination of schemes was accompanied by the infants understanding that the object continued to exist even though it was out of sight. However, this permanence was limited, for example, if an object was first hidden in location A but is then hidden in location B, in full view of the infant, they tended to search for the object in the location that they first found it. Piaget described this behaviour as ( stage iv errors). He concluded from these errors that infants were endowed with some mental knowledge of object permanence, hence their success in retrieving hidden objects, but that their mental representation of an objects existence, being separate from their actions, was still incomplete since they were unable to generalise this knowledge to different spatial locations. Therefore, Piaget maintains that at this stage a link still exists between the infants actions and the object.

        As a result of his investigations Piaget (1954), concluded that before stage iv the infant will not search for an hidden object. During stage v the infant will only search for objects in the place where it was most recently seen, whereas stage vi infants will search for object that have been placed invisibly from the infant, Piaget claims that this behaviour indicates that the infant no longer relies on his actions to prove the existence of an object but is now reliant on his mental knowledge that an object continues to exist in time and space despite it's invisibility to the human eye.

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Piaget's developmental stages of object concept in infancy has undoubtedly been at the root of numerous investigations, over the last twenty years or so. Some researchers have been concerned with trying to find alternative explanations for the basic Paigetian phenomena, especially the stage iv search errors. Whilst other researchers have used a number of new techniques, in order to test the reliability of his theory of object permanence. For instance a number of authors (e.g Bower 1974; Baillargeon,Spelke, & Wasserman 1985;), have suggested that the reason why young infants fail Piaget's search tasks before the age of 9 months, ...

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