MEDICAL EXPRESS
Researchers used to think that babies less than two years old did not understand that an object continues to exist when it is not currently in the baby’s view. But in the mid-1980s, new ways of doing experiments with babies found that they do, in fact, know that objects don’t disappear when you’re not looking at them—a concept known as object permanence. But it was still unknown what babies needed to remember about objects in order to remember their existence.
Now Melissa Kibbe, of Johns Hopkins University, and Alan Leslie, of Rutgers University, are working to figure out exactly what it is that babies remember about objects. For the new study, they showed six-month-old babies two objects, a disk and a triangle. Then they hid the objects behind small screens, first one shape, then the other. Earlier research has shown that young babies can remember what was hidden most recently, but have more trouble remembering the first object that was hidden. Once the shapes were hidden, they lifted the screen in front of the first object. Sometimes they showed infants the shape that was hidden there originally, but sometimes it was the other shape, and sometimes the object had vanished completely.
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