Abstract:

Object permanence is an important developmental milestone in a child's cognitive development as it signifies a child's ability to understand that objects continue to exist even when they can no longer be seen or heard. This is an important developmental milestone in the child's working memory.

This paper will report findings about children in a three year follow-through study conducted in a large child care organization in Singapore. The research measured infants, toddlers and three year old children in naturalistic settings in 20 centres selected according to geographic areas. Two research tools to measure object permanence were the Brigance Early Childhood Screens 111 Measurement Scale (French, 2013) and a Milestones Checklist developed by Ebbeck et al (2013) Object permanence recorded in the measures was found to occur much earlier than in other published research. This was evident in infants from 5-6 months partially searching for hidden objects and from 8-12 months showing an understanding of object permanence - looking for things that had disappeared.
Implications of the study findings include the importance of a quality early childhood curriculum where there is sound teacher understanding of object permanence development in children. In teacher education programs object permanence need to be included in child development program content and students in training giving guidance as to what to look for in children's development and how to give children opportunities to develop this important cognitive area as they explore the world around them.
Examples of appropriate activities will be included in the paper.

Keywords:

Research study results, development of object permanence, children aged 0-2.