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Origins of Mind

Permanence

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

There is evidence that abilities to represent unperceived objects as persisting appear early in infancy, from four months of age or earlier. It appears that a single set of principles might explain both abilities to represent objects as persisting and abilities to segment objects.

Slides

Notes

Terminology: the ability to track objects while briefly unperceived is called object permanence.

Infants demonstrate object permanence in habituation, violation-of-expectation and anticipatory looking paradigms from four months of age or earlier (Spelke, Kestenbaum, Simons, & Wein, 1995; Aguiar & Baillargeon, 2002; Rosander & Hofsten, 2004; Wang, Baillargeon, & Brueckner, 2004).

Object permanence is also found in nonhuman adults including

The Simple View Again

Demonstrations of object permanence are often interpreted in ways which do, or appear to, imply commitment to the Simple View. For example:

‘evidence that infants look reliably longer at the unexpected than at the expected event is taken to indicate that they (1) possess the expectation under investigation; (2) detect the violation in the unexpected event; and (3) are surprised by this violation. The term surprise is used here simply as a short-hand descriptor, to denote a state of heightened attention or interest caused by an expectation violation.’ (Wang et al., 2004, p. \ 168).

and:

‘To make sense of such results [i.e. the results from violation-of-expectation tasks], we … must assume that infants, like older learners, formulate … hypotheses about physical events and revise and elaborate these hypotheses in light of additional input.’ (Aguiar & Baillargeon, 2002, p. \ 329)

Glossary

object permanence : the ability to track objects while briefly unperceived.
Simple View : This term is used for two thematically related claims. Concerning physical objects, the Simple View is the claim that the Principles of Object Perception are things we know or believe, and we generate expectations from these principles by a process of inference. Concerning the goals of actions, the Simple View is the claim that the principles comprising the Teleological Stance are things we know or believe, and we are able to track goals by making inferences from these principles.

References

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