Jean Piaget's Influence In The Field Of Childhood Development

At one point, every living creature was once an infant; however, this stage in life is a focus for researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the human experience. Infancy is often defined as the time between birth and two years of age. During this time infants go through several psychological developments such as object permanence and facial recognition. Along with these psychological developments, infants’ brains also expand rapidly to accommodate the inpour of social information.

Jean Piaget has been a critical influence in the field of childhood development. Piaget was a Swiss clinical psychologist that lived from 1896 to 1980. He claimed that there are four basic developmental stages throughout the human lifespan; however, the first

This begged the question if previous studies had been studying situational permanence rather than their intended object permanence. The study conducted by Moore and Meltzoff set out to find out how well the memory of the location of the object was, along with a longer stretch of time between hiding and searching, the removal of the infant from the testing room, and even a change of the room itself. This study was very different from previous ones and tested several aspects of object permanence at once to determine how infant development of this compared to that of an adult. These researchers concluded that even through a twenty-four-hour separation, fourteen-month old infants were still able to remember the location of the hidden object. Also, Moore and Meltzoff revealed that infants would not bother looking for something inside a new room, inferring that meant they knew it was not there to begin with, and their experiments sprouted a new behavior showing that infants rely on identification of the object they are searching for (Moore & Meltzoff, 2004). This study not only continued to prove that object permanence is a mile-stone for infant development and that object permanence in infants is rather like that of an adult, they also proved that there is still much to be learned about this seemingly simple aspect of