According to Jean Piaget, the development of object permanence marks the transition from the sensorimotor stage to the preoperational stage. Simple games like peek-a-boo help illustrate and reinforce this emerging skill, making them valuable tools in early learning.
Developing object permanence offers several key benefits that support a child’s broader cognitive and emotional growth. This fundamental ability relies on the development of mental representations, or schemas, which allow infants to retain the idea of objects in their minds even when those objects are no longer visible.
As part of brain development, the capacity for object permanence indicates that memory, attention, and neural pathways involved in reasoning and perception are becoming more advanced. According to cognitive psychology, this skill represents a critical step in understanding that the world is stable and predictable, even when elements of it are temporarily out of view.
- https://www.simplypsychology.org/object-permanence.html
