Object Permanance in Infants
Richard S. Bogartz
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Interpretations of a large body of work on infant cognition rest on the assumption that young infants know that an object continues to exist even after it is completely concealed by an opaque occluder. If young infants were unable to represent an occluded object, much of this work would require reinterpretation. Perhaps the most frequently cited article supporting the hypothesis is the original “drawbridge” study by Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman (1985). The results of this study and its sequelae (e.g., Baillargeon, 1997a, 1997b) have been interpreted as providing unambiguous evidence of object permanence in Stage 3 infants. As recent theoretical positions challenging the hypothesis of object permanence have emerged (e.g., Bogartz, Shinskey, & Speaker, 1997; Haith, 1998; Meltzoff & Moore, 1998), it is only natural that the experimental support for this hypothesis would receive increased experimental attention. Rivera, Wakeley, and Langer (1999) provided important experimental evidence calling into question the object permanence interpretation of the drawbridge results. The three articles in this thematic collection provide additional experimental evidence.

In this thematic collection, Bogartz, Shinskey, and Schilling (this issue) and Cashon and Cohen (this issue) used Event Set × Event Set designs to study the rotating screen paradigm. They interpreted their results as indicating that infants are using novelty and familiarity preferences to determine their looking times. The results showed that infants did not use the possibility or impossibility of events but instead used familiarity or novelty relations between the habituation events and the test events to determine their looking times. The results suggested that the Baillargeon et al. (1985) study should not be interpreted as indicating object permanence or solidity knowledge in young infants. Schilling (this issue) used a different design but reached the same conclusion that infants were responding with a familiarity preference rather than being surprised at violation of a physical principle.

The three research reports in the thematic collection are followed by commentaries by Renee Baillargeon, Richard Aslin, and Yuko Munakata. The authors of the thematic collection then reply to those commentaries.