Development of the Concept of Object Permanence in Infancy
Kyung Ja Park
Abstract
This study had two purposes. First, to examine the stages and developmental order of object permanence based on Piaget`s theory. Second, to assess the effects of delay, attentiveness, and direction of gaze. Two experiments were conducted to examine the object permanence development in infants. The subjects for the 2 experiments were randomly drawn from a well-baby clinic. The subjects for Experiment 1 were 72 infants, 12 each in 6 age levels : 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21 months old. Experiment 1 was designed to examine the stages and developmental order of object concept development, ana infants received 5 tasks as follows : (1) finding an object partially hidden under one box (2) finding an object completely hidden under one box (3) finding an object after successive visible displacements (4) finding an object after one invisible displacement (5) finding an object after successive invisible displacements. The subjects for Experiment 2 were 24 9-month-olds. Experiment 2 was designed to assess the effects of delay, attentiveness, and direction of gaze for Stage IV of object concept development. Subjects were equally assigned into one of two delay groups: 0-sec delay and 3-sec delay. Attentiveness was rated in terms of a three-point scale, and then divided into high and low attentive groups. Direction of gaze was judged into two directions. In two experiments, infants received three trials of task, and received a score of 0, 1, 2 for each trials. Data were analyzed by ANOVA, Tukey test, and t-test for task performance, and direction of gaze was analyzed by chi-square. The results obtained from two experiments were as follows : 1. In object permanence test, subjects obtained significantly higher scores with age, and 6, 9, 12, 18 months were classified into different developmental stages. 2. In object permanence development, subjects received significantly different scores with task and a developmental order of tasks was found. First of all, infants mastered finding an object partially hidden under one box, and then mastered finding an object completely hidden under one box. Contrary to Piagetian theory, in this study, the development of finding an object after successive visible displacements and finding an object after one invisible displacement were sometimes reversed. Finally, finding an object after successive invisible displacements was mastered, and the concept of object permanence was completed. 3. In Stage IV of object concept development, a 3-sec delay did not significantly affect the performance of tasks. The O-sec delay group didn`t perform significantly better than the 3-sec delay group. 4. In Stage IV of object concept development, attentiveness of infants significantly affected the performance of task. So the highly attentive infants obtained better performance scores than the low attentive infants. 5. In Stage Ⅳ of object concept development, direction of gaze significantly affected the performance of task. That is, infants who gazed at the box which contained the object showed a higher rate of success than infants who gazed at the box which had already displaced the object.
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