Week 3 Post 2

One section that I found to be very interesting when reading chapter 6 is the object permanence revisited section. This section explains that until Piaget discovered the concept of object permanence, people believed that infants understand objects the same way that everyone else does. Piaget's experiment proves the accuracy of this concept. Piaget believes that failure to search for the object means that the infant has not grasped the concept of object permanence. I was intrigued by the way some researchers argue this belief. The researchers noted that Piaget did not take into account whether the infant has immaturities such as imperfect motor skills or a fragile memory. If an infant has one of these delays, it could appear as though the child has conceptual incompetence. In one experiment, researchers traced the eye movement and brain activity of infants as they tested their understanding of object permanence. This experiment showed that infants as young as four and a half months demonstrating some understanding of object permanence. Some researchers debate that infants as young as two and three months of age can represent fully hidden objects. Other research shows that some animals such as dogs and cats develop object permanence at a younger age than humans do. I found this debate about object permanence to be very interesting. Before I read this chapter, I had only known about Piaget's theory of object permanence but I never learned about the other experiments performed or other researchers ideas.