Define Piaget's concept of object permanence and describe the connection between object permanence and deferred imitation.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Piaget noted that infants under the age of about 8 months act as if an object no longer exists once it is out of their line of sight. This led to his theorizing about the object concept-the understanding that objects have independent existence, characteristics, and locations in space. One aspect of the object concept is object permanence, the realization that something continues to exist when out of sight. At first, infants appear to have no such concept. However, by 18 to 24 months, almost all babies understand that objects have independent existences and will reliably search for hidden objects. According to Piaget, object permanence develops gradually during the sensorimotor stage as children develop the ability to symbolically represent objects.

Piaget believed that children under 18 months could not engage in deferred imitation, a more complex ability requiring long-term memory. Deferred imitation is the reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time. As the behavior is no longer happening, deferred imitation requires that a stored representation of the action be recalled. Piaget argued that young children could not engage in deferred imitation because they lacked the ability to retain mental representations.