Recent research indicates that by 4.5 months, infants use shape and size information as the basis for individuating objects but that it is not until 11.5 months that they use color information for this purpose. The present experiments investigated the extent to which infants' sensitivity to color information could be increased through select…

Experience with a variety of symbolic artifacts has been proposed as a mechanism underlying symbolic development. In this study, the parents of 120 2-year-old children who participated in symbolic object retrieval tasks completed a questionnaire regarding their children's naturalistic experience with symbolic artifacts and activities. In separate…

Tested two competing hypotheses explaining infants' failure to search for an object in a new hiding place: (1) that the concept of object is not yet differentiated from the concept of place, and (2) that difficulties in spatial localization are responsible for the search failure. (Author/JMB)

Developmentalists have overlooked the problem of the real impermanence of things. Though the metaphor of impermanence is central to Piagetian and neo-nativist accounts of representation, the development of the understanding of impermanence is unstudied. This article proposes that the development of the concept of impermanence is distinct from the…

Infants aged 3-5 months (mean of approximately 4 months) were given a novel anticipatory looking task to test object permanence understanding. They were trained to expect an experimenter to retrieve an object from behind a transparent screen upon hearing a cue (''Doors up, here comes the hand''). The experimenter then hid the object behind one of…

The question of whether object recognition is orientation-invariant or orientation-dependent was investigated using a repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. In RB, the second occurrence of a repeated stimulus is less likely to be reported, compared to the occurrence of a different stimulus, if it occurs within a short time of the first presentation.…

According to Jean Piaget, children begin to develop a concept of an object, such as that it has sides that are not visible from the child's perspective or that it is likely to be where one saw it last, in early infancy. By the close of the prelinguistic phase at about 2 years old, the child has developed a mature object concept, one that…

The phenomenon called "aging out" includes approximately 20,000 young people who enter adulthood directly from foster care each year (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). The number of youth and young adults who aged out of care in the U.S. in 2005, the year for which the most current statistics are available, increased 48 percent…

Chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") and bonobos ("Pan paniscus") (Study 1) and 18- and 24-month-old human children (Study 2) participated in a novel communicative task. A human experimenter (E) hid food or a toy in one of two opaque containers before gesturing towards the reward's location in one of two ways. In the Informing condition, she attempted…

Three longitudinal studies were conducted to examine the generalization of detour ability across motor responses and barrier types, and to investigate the relationship between the development of object permanence and detour ability. Results were discussed in terms of differences in reaching and locomotor detour performances. (Author/CI)

Fifteen autistic children (four to six years old) were assessed for visual self-recognition ability, as well as for object permanence and gestural imitation. It was found that 13 of 15 autistic children showed evidence of self-recognition. Consistent relationships were suggested between self-cognition and object permanence but not between…

Under equivalent task conditions, assessed object and person concept attainment in securely and insecurely attached infants. Subjects were 16 male and 23 female infants from middle class families. (Author/RH)

H. Corman and S. Escalona's scales for object permanence and spatial relationships were readministered to 71 severely and profoundly mentally retarded individuals (mean age 19 years) five years after the last previous administration of the scales. Gains in mean scores were small but statistically significant for both scales. (Author)

The study assessed object permanence construct performance in 20 severely handicapped students (4 to 14 years old) who were differentiated by treatment (prompt) condition and motor ability level. Results revealed a trait (motor ability) x treatment interaction. (Author/SB)

Drawing on Piaget's own work and some contemporary studies of social interaction, the author concludes that one may reinterpret Piaget's descriptive psychology in terms of the infant's growing communicative competency. (Author/MP)