Synonyms
Definition
The apparent maintenance of object identity over time, especially during periods of non-observation.
Introduction
Typically-developing human beings and at least some other animals tend to regard the objects around them, including other organisms, landscape features, and artifacts, as maintaining their identities – remaining the “same thing” – over time whether they are observed continuously or not. Objects are, in other words, regarded as “permanent” or “persistent” by default. Both experimental and theoretical practice in psychology largely adopt the “naïve realist” assumption that objects having the properties they are typically perceived to have are ontologically real, i.e., they in fact exist in an observation-independent way and in fact maintain their identities over time. Given this assumption, object permanence is the recognition or understanding of the continuous, identity-preserving existence of...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Adolphs, R. (2009). The social brain: Neural basis for social knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 693–716.
Baillargeon, R. (2008). Innate ideas revisited: For a principle of persistence in infants’ physical reasoning. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 3, 2–13.
Baldassarre, G., & Mirolli, M. (Eds.). (2013). Intrinsically motivated learning in natural and artificial systems. Berlin: Springer.
Ball, G., Alijabar, P., Zebari, S., Tusor, N., Arichi, T., Merchant, N., Robinson, E. C., Ogundipe, E., Ruekert, D., Edwards, A. D., & Counsell, S. J. (2014). Rich-club organization of the newborn human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 111, 7456–7461.
Bjorklund, D. F., & Pellegrini, A. D. (2002). The origins of human nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 1–38.
Cangelosi, A., & Schlesinger, M. (2015). Developmental robotics: From babies to robots. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Carroll, S. B. (2008). Evo-devo and an expanding evolutionary synthesis: A genetic theory of morphological evolution. Cell, 134, 25–36.
Eichenbaum, H., Yonelinas, A. R., & Ranganath, C. (2007). The medial temporal lobe and recognition memory. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 30, 123–152.
Dunbar, R. I. M., & Shultz, S. (2007). Evolution in the social brain. Science, 317, 1344–1347.
Düntsch, I., & Gediga, G. (2000). Rough set data analysis. Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, 43, 281–301.
Fama, R., Pitel, A.-L., & Sullivan, E. V. (2012). Anterograde episodic memory in Korsakoff syndrome. Neuropsychological Review, 22, 93–104.
Fields, C. (2011). Trajectory recognition as the basis for object individuation: A functional model of object file instantiation and object-token encoding. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science, 2, 49.
Fields, C. (2012). The very same thing: Extending the object token concept to incorporate causal constraints on individual identity. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 8, 234–247.
Fields, C., & Glazebrook, J. F. (2017). Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: A positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of autism in early infancy. Cognitive Neurodynamics, 11, 1–21.
Flombaum, J. I., Scholl, B. J., & Santos, L. R. (2008). Spatiotemporal priority as a fundamental principle of object persistence. In B. Hood & L. Santos (Eds.), The origins of object knowledge (pp. 135–164). New York: Oxford University Press.
Gao, W., Alcauter, S., Smith, J. K., Gilmore, J. H., & Lin, W. (2015). Development of human brain cortical network architecture during infancy. Brain Structure & Function, 220, 1173–1186.
Geschwind, D. H., & Flint, J. (2015). Genetics and genomics of psychiatric disease. Science, 349, 1489–1494.
Gomot, M., & Wicker, B. (2012). A challenging, unpredictable world for people with autism spectrum disorder. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 83, 240–247.
Güntürkün, O., & Bugnyar, T. (2016). Cognition without cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20, 291–303.
Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 1480–1506.
Jaakkola, K. (2014). Do animals understand invisible displacement? A critical review. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 128, 225–239.
Johnson, C. M., Sullivan, J., Buck, C. L., Trexel, J., & Scarpuzzi, M. (2015). Visible and invisible displacement with dynamic visual occlusion in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp). Animal Cognition, 18, 179–193.
Karg, K., Schmelz, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2014). All great ape species (Gorilla gorilla, Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Pongo abelii) and two-and-a-half-year-old children discriminate appearance from reality. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 128, 431–439.
Klein, S. B. (2014). Sameness and the self: Philosophical and psychological considerations. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science, 5, 29.
Mathews, W. J., & Meck, W. H. (2014). Time perception: The bad news and the good. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science, 5, 429–446.
Merchant, H., Harrington, D. L., & Meck, W. H. (2013). Neural basis of the perception and estimation of time. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 36, 313–336.
Metzinger, T. (2011). The no-self alternative. In S. Gallagher (Ed.), The oxford handbook of the self (pp. 287–305). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Müller, G. B. (2007). Evo-devo: Extending the evolutionary synthesis. Nature Reviews Genetics, 8, 943–949.
Rochat, P. (2012). Primordial sense of embodied self-unity. In V. Slaughter & C. A. Brownell (Eds.), Early development of body representations (pp. 3–18). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scholl, B. J. (2007). Object persistence in philosophy and psychology. Mind & Language, 22, 563–591.
Thornton, A., & Lukas, D. (2012). Individual variation in cognitive performance: Developmental and evolutionary perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 367, 2773–2783.
Wiseman, H. (2015). Quantum physics: Death by experiment for local realism. Nature, 526, 649–650.
Zentall, J. R., & Pattison, K. F. (2016). Now you see it, now you don't: Object permanence in dogs. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25, 357–362.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Fields, C. (2017). Object Permanence. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2373-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2373-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences