Content area
Full Text
Contents
- Abstract
- Memory for hidden objects
- Object identity
- Spatial understanding
- EXPERIMENT 1: LEAVING THE DISAPPEARANCE LOCALE
- Method
- Participants
- Test Environment and Apparatus
- Test Materials
- Design
- Procedure
- Day 1: Pretreatment Procedures
- (a) Focusing attention on features of the room
- (b) Peek-a-boo by the experimenter
- (c) Refocusing attention on the room
- (d) Interactive games
- (e) Towel-covering event
- Day 1: Experimental (Object Hidden) Group
- Day 1: Occluder-Manipulation Control Group
- Day 2: Preassessment Room-Reminder Procedures
- (a) Reminder of the experimenter's peek-a-boo game
- (b) Reminders of room features
- (c) Towel-uncovering event
- Day 2: Memory Test
- Day 2: Object-Visible Test
- Scoring Procedures
- Operational Definitions
- Scoring Agreement
- Results and Discussion
- Memory Test
- Object-Visible Test
- EXPERIMENT 2: RETURNING TO THE SAME OR A CHANGED LOCALE
- Method
- Participants
- Test Environment and Apparatus
- Test Materials
- Design
- Procedure
- Day 1: Experimental Group (Object Hidden)
- Day 1: Baseline Control Group
- Day 1: Room-Change (Object Hidden) Groups
- Day 2: Preassessment Room-Reminder Procedures
- Day 2: Memory Test
- Day 2: Object-Visible Test
- Operational Definitions and Scoring
- Results and Discussion
- Memory Test
- Object-Visible Test
- GENERAL DISCUSSION
- Memory
- Object Permanence
- Is Room Change Interpreted as a Change of Spatial Locale?
- Object Identity
Figures and Tables
Abstract
Fourteen-month-old infants saw an object hidden inside a container and were removed from the disappearance locale for 24 hr. Upon their return, they searched correctly for the hidden object, demonstrating object permanence and long-term memory. Control infants who saw no disappearance did not search. In Experiment 2, infants returned to see the container either in the same or a different room. Performance by room-change infants dropped to baseline levels, suggesting that infant search for hidden objects is guided by numerical identity. Infants seek the individual object that disappeared, which exists in its original location, not in a different room. A new behavior, identity-verifying search, was discovered and quantified. Implications are drawn for memory, spatial understanding, object permanence, and object identity.
Adults conceive of inanimate objects, other persons, and themselves as temporally enduring entities contained within a continuous space. In the everyday adult understanding, this external reality exists independently of human attention or action. For example, if an adult sees an object hidden, the adult believes that that individual object continues...