The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has influenced many professionals in the field of developmental psychology. In the study “Out of Sight, But Not Out of Mind” Piaget focused particularly on how and when object permanence seemed to develop; this was his research question. Object permanence is knowing that an object still exists even after it disappears from view. The hypothesis for this study was that one’s cognitive ability was formed during the first two years of life during the sensorimotor stage of development (Hock, 137). This study was done because while working at the Binet Laboratory in Paris, Piaget noticed that the children taking an intelligence test seemed to make the same mistakes as each other. Not only did they make the same mistakes, but their reasoning for their mistakes seemed to be that they used the same strategy to answer the questions as well. It was because of this that Piaget began to focus on how children develop cognitively. In addition, the fact that Piaget had three children of his own, whose ages were during the time that object permanence would be beginning to make an appearance; this gave him easy access to subjects to study.
This research on object permanence would be a descriptive study. Although Piaget considered his work to be an interviewing technique, because of the fact that babies and toddlers can’t actually give proper answers to interview questions, he observed and got involved with their play time in their own home. By doing this, he would be allowing the subjects to direct where the “questions” would go (Hock, 136). The subjects in this study were Piaget’s three children. This was allowed because it was found that the responses from the Piaget children are the same as those from any other child.
First off, the four stages of cognitive development should be laid out just like in table 18-1 of Forty Studies that Changed Psychology. First is the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years), then the preoperational stage (2-7 years), concrete operations (7-11 years), and the last stage is the formal operations stage (11 to adulthood). During this study, Piaget came up with six sub-stages that take place within sensorimotor cognitive development, which became the basis of his research. It is important to point out that he found that a child could not move onto the preoperational stage without completing the sensorimotor stage in full; this fact applies to each stage. After starting the study, stage 1 was found to take place between birth to only a month of age. In that first stage only reflexes that the child needed seemed to be present, such as touch. Therefore, object permanence doesn’t even begin to develop quite yet. Next, in stage 2, which takes place from one to four months old, object permanence still doesn’t show any signs of development, but Piaget noticed the infants doing things that would eventually lead up to its development. For example, they would grab their own feet, and then continue that same action—Piaget called this primary circular reactions (Hock, 137). Moreover, “If an object leaves the child’s visual field and fails to reappear, the child will turn its attention to other visible objects and show no signs of looking for the “vanished” object. However, if the object repeatedly reappears in the same location, the infant will look longer at that point. Piaget called this passive expectation” (Hock, 137). This was found through the observation of his son as he would stand over his basinet, disappear and reappear at almost the same instance of time. He noticed that his son seemed to watch for him to come back by staring at the spot in which he last saw his father. In conclusion, although object permanence wasn’t quite present in stage 2, Piaget could see that it would form soon after this stage.
In stage 3 of the sensorimotor stage (4-10 months), the children in his experiment began to interact with objects more by touching, looking at them more inquisitively, and also watching objects carefully. Finally, it was towards the end of the third stage that Piaget noticed object permanence at its beginnings of actual development. This was noticed from the fact that a child would search for the object that had disappeared if they could still see part of it (Hock, 138). The demonstration of this was shown by Piaget playing with his daughter, whom was nine months old; he would hide her toy, but keep part of it revealed, and she would look for it. But as soon as he had hidden it completely she stopped searching for it. However, even though its development begins during the third stage, it is due to the fact that there was a lack of independent existence that object permanence still doesn’t completely exist in this stage, meaning the child doesn’t see an object as existing by itself, but rather being connected to their perception of it, or as explained by Hock “…it is simply perceived as being in the process of disappearing” (Hock, 138). A child at this age wouldn’t be able to notice that the object is simply being hidden behind something.
At the beginning of stage 4 (10-12 months) children know that even after an object disappears from their view, it still exists, and therefore they will look for it even without being able to see at least a portion of it. Even though they have that ability, object permanence development still isn’t complete because a child doesn’t have visible displacement. An example of what this means is that if a child sees a person hide a toy behind the TV for instance, they will go find the toy behind the TV, but then if a child sees that person hide the object behind a stereo, the child will still go look for the object where they found it the first time. Piaget referred to this as the A-not-B effect; the same error would be made over and over by the child during this stage (Hock, 139). The explanation for why children of this age do this is that in the child’s mind the object becomes one with where it’s being hidden, and is therefore not a separate object by itself to them. This is what keeps them from making the association between the toy and another hiding place because it has already been associated with the first hiding place, thus making the TV, in this example, part of the toy in the child’s mind.
For the next stage—5 (12-18 months), children can finally show that they know where an object was last displaced to. Therefore, they begin to think of the object as a thing of its own. Piaget did a similar exercise to the one laid out in the last example with one of his children by hiding an object in one place first, and then another. His son searched in the place that he saw his father put it in during that time—he didn’t attach the object to a particular spot (Hock, 139). However, object permanence is still underdeveloped until the last stage. The reasoning for this is the child’s lack of ability to comprehend invisible displacement. Hock provides the following example to explain this: “You watch someone place a coin in a small box and then, with his or her back to you, the person walks over to the dresser and opens the drawer. When the person returns you discover that the box is empty” (Hock, 139). In this example it is easy to think that one would simply go look in the drawer, however, a child during this stage may look at the drawer, but they may not make the association of looking in it for the coin because they thought it should be in the box. At this point a child is very close to understanding object permanence.
During the final sub-stage of the sensorimotor development—stage 6 (18-24 months), object permanence is completely developed. Another exercise was done with one of Piaget’s daughters in this case; he hid a pencil box beneath several things. She looked under each covering until she found the pencil box, which showed that she knew the object hadn’t just disappeared. Once object permanence develops, a child can move onto the preoperational stage of cognitive development. The reasoning for this is “Piaget considered the cognitive skill of object permanence to be the beginnings of true thought; the ability to use insight and mental symbolism to solve problems” (Hock, 140). After this point of development, it is safe to say that a child knows where an object has gone when it disappears from their senses.
Due to the fact that Piaget’s theory and work has been the basis of much of developmental psychology, there has been quite a bit of subsequent research with his theory in mind. Of course some research has risen out of disagreement with Piaget’s theory. There are many psychologists who don’t think cognitive development can happen in such defined stages. For instance, learning theorists think that people learn by modeling the environment around them, and therefore think that learning continues throughout life; to them this means that learning cannot be put into a small scope of four stages (Hock, 141). Moreover, another developmental psychologist, Renee Baillargeon showed that only a couple months after birth, a baby could already start to understand object permanence. She disagreed with Piaget because newborns don’t have the motor abilities to exemplify this skill, so it is unfair to say that they don’t have it. An additional experiment dealing with this topic was done by hiding an object from a child aged a little over six months. The objects were hidden in the dark first and then under a cloth in the light—it was found that the children found the object easier while searching for it in the dark (Hock, 141). The explanation of this could be the following, “…the appearance of the cloth interferes with the infants’ new, fragile ability to represent the object mentally. An alternate explanation may be that our ability to think about, and search for, objects in (potentially dangerous) darkness was more adaptive from an evolutionary survival perspective than doing so when items are merely hidden in the light” (Hock, 142). Both of these explanations seem to make sense because a child at that age might have trouble remembering what the object looked like, and therefore wouldn’t exactly be able to look for it very easily. In the second example, anyone would most likely find the object as quick as possible if it meant they could get out of darkness by doing so. These are only a couple cases of subsequent research, but many more can be found due to Piaget’s influence on developmental psychology.
The aforementioned influence of Piaget’s theory shows that this experiment has been very important not just in the field of psychology, but also in the world. Piaget showed that children aren’t less intelligent than adults, they just simply think in a different way (McLeod). It is theories like his that allow people to structure educational practices according to how children think. In addition, it can help educational psychologists to come up with ways for schools to teach young students in a way that can allow them to form a deeper level of thinking, such as using common core math in U.S. elementary schools. Furthermore, as mentioned by Hock, when theories like Piaget’s are discussed, it allows people to understand cognition even more. Not only is cognition important to understand, but children’s cognition in particular because it allows people to be able to teach them in a way that the child can comprehend the material. It won’t do much good to teach a child something that is completely above their level of cognition. For instance, it would be counterproductive to try to teach a preschooler algebra because they simply won’t understand how letters represent numbers when they have just learned all the letters of the alphabet. In conclusion, it is important to know how people think in order to understand why people do the things that they do.
There are a few words that should be understood in order to understand other stages in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Therefore, each stage should be summarized. Even though object permanence in the sensorimotor stage has been considered the basis of intellectuality, all four stages of cognitive development are important. First off, the preoperational stage takes place after the sensorimotor stage is completed. In this stage a child begins to learn to speak more effectively, by asking questions, as well as by using symbols; children will often begin to play imaginary games, such as “house” (Ciccarelli, 313). As the textbook mentions, at this age “They are not yet capable of logical thought—they can use simple mental concepts but are not able to use those concepts in a more rational, logical sense. They believe that anything that moves is alive, a quality called animism” (Ciccarelli, 313). Moreover, during this stage many errors in thinking occur—the aforementioned term animism only being one of them. The other errors include the following: egocentrism—only having the ability to see the world through their own eyes, centration—only noticing one part of an object instead of all the features (a child may complain that their sibling got two crackers when they only got one, but if their cracker is split in half, they will then see it as having two separate crackers, and therefore the same amount as their sibling). Conservation is another error in cognition—the inability to understand that when the appearance of an object is changed, it doesn’t mean that the object’s nature has been changed. Lastly is irreversibility—the child is unable to think about how something that they have seen done can be undone. These errors in thinking are meant to be resolved by the time a child reaches the next stage of cognitive development.
Concrete operations comes after preoperational development. By this stage a child is generally between the ages of 7 and 12. Conservation, reversibility, and centration are all resolved by this time. Additionally, they are able to think in a more rational way when it comes to answering questions, and they become more logical. Although children have grown up quite a bit by the concrete operations stage, they still don’t usually have the ability to think in abstract ways, which means that they have trouble understanding intangible concepts (Ciccarelli, 314). After completing this stage of development, people finally enter the formal operations stage, which takes place from around 12 years old, into adulthood. Abstract thinking is an ability people hold by this time. Thinking is also a lot deeper at this level of cognitive development. In fact, it makes sense that abstract thinking wouldn’t completely develop until this time because the human brain isn’t fully developed until around age 25. The prefrontal cortex is also the last structure to finish development, which is the part of the brain responsible for processes, such as abstract thinking. Psychology textbooks aren’t the only source that one can find good information about Piaget’s theory, research articles also provide interesting information.
In a Simply Psychology research article, one of the key components of Piaget’s cognitive theory is discussed. Schemas are one of the components that can help his theory to be understood further. These can be defined by Piaget as being “a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning” (McLeod). Schemas help people to answer questions about incoming information. The number of these schemas increases as someone’s level of thinking becomes deeper and more developed (McLeod). The reason that Piaget believed they are so important is that they allow us to build up memory of what to do in certain situations. As one can see, it is logical to call schemas “building blocks of knowledge” as they “build up” each time someone learns something new.
As a final point, I feel that I can use knowledge of this research in my own life because it applies to everyone. All of us are constantly learning each day, and that puts Piaget’s theory to work. The stages laid out in his theory don’t just cover babies, young children, and adolescents because the formal stage mostly applies to adults. The reason that the theory touches base with every age of life is because learning never stops—even after leaving school. Therefore, I feel that by understanding the stage of cognitive development that I am in, as well as the stages others around me are in, I will be able to understand myself even better. My reason for feeling this way is that when one understands someone’s level of thinking they can communicate better with that person. Moreover, someday when I have children, I don’t think I will be as pushy to get them to be “smarter” or push them to do things that someone at their age just isn’t ready to do, simply due to their stage of cognition. I now understand that each child develops at their own pace, as well as that there are things that they are guaranteed to learn anyways, so there’s no point in rushing the process. These are just a few examples of how I feel that my life has become more knowledgeable after learning about object permanence and the rest of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
This research on object permanence would be a descriptive study. Although Piaget considered his work to be an interviewing technique, because of the fact that babies and toddlers can’t actually give proper answers to interview questions, he observed and got involved with their play time in their own home. By doing this, he would be allowing the subjects to direct where the “questions” would go (Hock, 136). The subjects in this study were Piaget’s three children. This was allowed because it was found that the responses from the Piaget children are the same as those from any other child.
First off, the four stages of cognitive development should be laid out just like in table 18-1 of Forty Studies that Changed Psychology. First is the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years), then the preoperational stage (2-7 years), concrete operations (7-11 years), and the last stage is the formal operations stage (11 to adulthood). During this study, Piaget came up with six sub-stages that take place within sensorimotor cognitive development, which became the basis of his research. It is important to point out that he found that a child could not move onto the preoperational stage without completing the sensorimotor stage in full; this fact applies to each stage. After starting the study, stage 1 was found to take place between birth to only a month of age. In that first stage only reflexes that the child needed seemed to be present, such as touch. Therefore, object permanence doesn’t even begin to develop quite yet. Next, in stage 2, which takes place from one to four months old, object permanence still doesn’t show any signs of development, but Piaget noticed the infants doing things that would eventually lead up to its development. For example, they would grab their own feet, and then continue that same action—Piaget called this primary circular reactions (Hock, 137). Moreover, “If an object leaves the child’s visual field and fails to reappear, the child will turn its attention to other visible objects and show no signs of looking for the “vanished” object. However, if the object repeatedly reappears in the same location, the infant will look longer at that point. Piaget called this passive expectation” (Hock, 137). This was found through the observation of his son as he would stand over his basinet, disappear and reappear at almost the same instance of time. He noticed that his son seemed to watch for him to come back by staring at the spot in which he last saw his father. In conclusion, although object permanence wasn’t quite present in stage 2, Piaget could see that it would form soon after this stage.
In stage 3 of the sensorimotor stage (4-10 months), the children in his experiment began to interact with objects more by touching, looking at them more inquisitively, and also watching objects carefully. Finally, it was towards the end of the third stage that Piaget noticed object permanence at its beginnings of actual development. This was noticed from the fact that a child would search for the object that had disappeared if they could still see part of it (Hock, 138). The demonstration of this was shown by Piaget playing with his daughter, whom was nine months old; he would hide her toy, but keep part of it revealed, and she would look for it. But as soon as he had hidden it completely she stopped searching for it. However, even though its development begins during the third stage, it is due to the fact that there was a lack of independent existence that object permanence still doesn’t completely exist in this stage, meaning the child doesn’t see an object as existing by itself, but rather being connected to their perception of it, or as explained by Hock “…it is simply perceived as being in the process of disappearing” (Hock, 138). A child at this age wouldn’t be able to notice that the object is simply being hidden behind something.
At the beginning of stage 4 (10-12 months) children know that even after an object disappears from their view, it still exists, and therefore they will look for it even without being able to see at least a portion of it. Even though they have that ability, object permanence development still isn’t complete because a child doesn’t have visible displacement. An example of what this means is that if a child sees a person hide a toy behind the TV for instance, they will go find the toy behind the TV, but then if a child sees that person hide the object behind a stereo, the child will still go look for the object where they found it the first time. Piaget referred to this as the A-not-B effect; the same error would be made over and over by the child during this stage (Hock, 139). The explanation for why children of this age do this is that in the child’s mind the object becomes one with where it’s being hidden, and is therefore not a separate object by itself to them. This is what keeps them from making the association between the toy and another hiding place because it has already been associated with the first hiding place, thus making the TV, in this example, part of the toy in the child’s mind.
For the next stage—5 (12-18 months), children can finally show that they know where an object was last displaced to. Therefore, they begin to think of the object as a thing of its own. Piaget did a similar exercise to the one laid out in the last example with one of his children by hiding an object in one place first, and then another. His son searched in the place that he saw his father put it in during that time—he didn’t attach the object to a particular spot (Hock, 139). However, object permanence is still underdeveloped until the last stage. The reasoning for this is the child’s lack of ability to comprehend invisible displacement. Hock provides the following example to explain this: “You watch someone place a coin in a small box and then, with his or her back to you, the person walks over to the dresser and opens the drawer. When the person returns you discover that the box is empty” (Hock, 139). In this example it is easy to think that one would simply go look in the drawer, however, a child during this stage may look at the drawer, but they may not make the association of looking in it for the coin because they thought it should be in the box. At this point a child is very close to understanding object permanence.
During the final sub-stage of the sensorimotor development—stage 6 (18-24 months), object permanence is completely developed. Another exercise was done with one of Piaget’s daughters in this case; he hid a pencil box beneath several things. She looked under each covering until she found the pencil box, which showed that she knew the object hadn’t just disappeared. Once object permanence develops, a child can move onto the preoperational stage of cognitive development. The reasoning for this is “Piaget considered the cognitive skill of object permanence to be the beginnings of true thought; the ability to use insight and mental symbolism to solve problems” (Hock, 140). After this point of development, it is safe to say that a child knows where an object has gone when it disappears from their senses.
Due to the fact that Piaget’s theory and work has been the basis of much of developmental psychology, there has been quite a bit of subsequent research with his theory in mind. Of course some research has risen out of disagreement with Piaget’s theory. There are many psychologists who don’t think cognitive development can happen in such defined stages. For instance, learning theorists think that people learn by modeling the environment around them, and therefore think that learning continues throughout life; to them this means that learning cannot be put into a small scope of four stages (Hock, 141). Moreover, another developmental psychologist, Renee Baillargeon showed that only a couple months after birth, a baby could already start to understand object permanence. She disagreed with Piaget because newborns don’t have the motor abilities to exemplify this skill, so it is unfair to say that they don’t have it. An additional experiment dealing with this topic was done by hiding an object from a child aged a little over six months. The objects were hidden in the dark first and then under a cloth in the light—it was found that the children found the object easier while searching for it in the dark (Hock, 141). The explanation of this could be the following, “…the appearance of the cloth interferes with the infants’ new, fragile ability to represent the object mentally. An alternate explanation may be that our ability to think about, and search for, objects in (potentially dangerous) darkness was more adaptive from an evolutionary survival perspective than doing so when items are merely hidden in the light” (Hock, 142). Both of these explanations seem to make sense because a child at that age might have trouble remembering what the object looked like, and therefore wouldn’t exactly be able to look for it very easily. In the second example, anyone would most likely find the object as quick as possible if it meant they could get out of darkness by doing so. These are only a couple cases of subsequent research, but many more can be found due to Piaget’s influence on developmental psychology.
The aforementioned influence of Piaget’s theory shows that this experiment has been very important not just in the field of psychology, but also in the world. Piaget showed that children aren’t less intelligent than adults, they just simply think in a different way (McLeod). It is theories like his that allow people to structure educational practices according to how children think. In addition, it can help educational psychologists to come up with ways for schools to teach young students in a way that can allow them to form a deeper level of thinking, such as using common core math in U.S. elementary schools. Furthermore, as mentioned by Hock, when theories like Piaget’s are discussed, it allows people to understand cognition even more. Not only is cognition important to understand, but children’s cognition in particular because it allows people to be able to teach them in a way that the child can comprehend the material. It won’t do much good to teach a child something that is completely above their level of cognition. For instance, it would be counterproductive to try to teach a preschooler algebra because they simply won’t understand how letters represent numbers when they have just learned all the letters of the alphabet. In conclusion, it is important to know how people think in order to understand why people do the things that they do.
There are a few words that should be understood in order to understand other stages in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Therefore, each stage should be summarized. Even though object permanence in the sensorimotor stage has been considered the basis of intellectuality, all four stages of cognitive development are important. First off, the preoperational stage takes place after the sensorimotor stage is completed. In this stage a child begins to learn to speak more effectively, by asking questions, as well as by using symbols; children will often begin to play imaginary games, such as “house” (Ciccarelli, 313). As the textbook mentions, at this age “They are not yet capable of logical thought—they can use simple mental concepts but are not able to use those concepts in a more rational, logical sense. They believe that anything that moves is alive, a quality called animism” (Ciccarelli, 313). Moreover, during this stage many errors in thinking occur—the aforementioned term animism only being one of them. The other errors include the following: egocentrism—only having the ability to see the world through their own eyes, centration—only noticing one part of an object instead of all the features (a child may complain that their sibling got two crackers when they only got one, but if their cracker is split in half, they will then see it as having two separate crackers, and therefore the same amount as their sibling). Conservation is another error in cognition—the inability to understand that when the appearance of an object is changed, it doesn’t mean that the object’s nature has been changed. Lastly is irreversibility—the child is unable to think about how something that they have seen done can be undone. These errors in thinking are meant to be resolved by the time a child reaches the next stage of cognitive development.
Concrete operations comes after preoperational development. By this stage a child is generally between the ages of 7 and 12. Conservation, reversibility, and centration are all resolved by this time. Additionally, they are able to think in a more rational way when it comes to answering questions, and they become more logical. Although children have grown up quite a bit by the concrete operations stage, they still don’t usually have the ability to think in abstract ways, which means that they have trouble understanding intangible concepts (Ciccarelli, 314). After completing this stage of development, people finally enter the formal operations stage, which takes place from around 12 years old, into adulthood. Abstract thinking is an ability people hold by this time. Thinking is also a lot deeper at this level of cognitive development. In fact, it makes sense that abstract thinking wouldn’t completely develop until this time because the human brain isn’t fully developed until around age 25. The prefrontal cortex is also the last structure to finish development, which is the part of the brain responsible for processes, such as abstract thinking. Psychology textbooks aren’t the only source that one can find good information about Piaget’s theory, research articles also provide interesting information.
In a Simply Psychology research article, one of the key components of Piaget’s cognitive theory is discussed. Schemas are one of the components that can help his theory to be understood further. These can be defined by Piaget as being “a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning” (McLeod). Schemas help people to answer questions about incoming information. The number of these schemas increases as someone’s level of thinking becomes deeper and more developed (McLeod). The reason that Piaget believed they are so important is that they allow us to build up memory of what to do in certain situations. As one can see, it is logical to call schemas “building blocks of knowledge” as they “build up” each time someone learns something new.
As a final point, I feel that I can use knowledge of this research in my own life because it applies to everyone. All of us are constantly learning each day, and that puts Piaget’s theory to work. The stages laid out in his theory don’t just cover babies, young children, and adolescents because the formal stage mostly applies to adults. The reason that the theory touches base with every age of life is because learning never stops—even after leaving school. Therefore, I feel that by understanding the stage of cognitive development that I am in, as well as the stages others around me are in, I will be able to understand myself even better. My reason for feeling this way is that when one understands someone’s level of thinking they can communicate better with that person. Moreover, someday when I have children, I don’t think I will be as pushy to get them to be “smarter” or push them to do things that someone at their age just isn’t ready to do, simply due to their stage of cognition. I now understand that each child develops at their own pace, as well as that there are things that they are guaranteed to learn anyways, so there’s no point in rushing the process. These are just a few examples of how I feel that my life has become more knowledgeable after learning about object permanence and the rest of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.