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This chapter proposes an identity development (ID) account of object permanence that locates the origins and development of permanence in infants' notions of how to determine and trace numerical identity. The arguments and evidence generated from this approach suggest a number of conclusions: (a) object permanence understanding is not an all-or-none attainment; (b) permanence is understood for some disappearance transforms but not others; (c) the development of infants' spatiotemporal criteria for numerical identity provide the form and ordering of the disappearance transforms over which they understand permanence; (d) apparent violations of permanence can cause negative emotion; and (e) taking seriously the conceptual distinctions between representation, identity, and permanence offers considerable theoretical power. The chapter presents a mechanism of change to account for the transition from having no concept of permanence to having permanence.

Physical cognition refers to mental abilities utilized during problem solving that are provided by the non-living environment. This chapter reviews the limited evidence on how dogs orient in their environment using various behaviour tactics such as path following and utilizing large-sized objects to find their way. Recent research on physical cognition in dogs indicates that dogs are able to deal with problems involving the permanence of objects and might deal with problems involving connectedness or relate to gravity.

Cognition, behavior, and development all happen in space, through sensorimotor interactions in a spatial physical world. In his classic theory of the emergence of cognition, Piaget proposed that infant cognition was grounded in these sensorimotor interactions and, indeed, limited by its very sensorimotor nature. One phenomenon that Piaget used to illustrate these ideas was the object concept as manifested in a task that has come to be known as the A‐not‐B task. Infant's perseverative searches for hidden objects in that task suggested object representations tightly tied to the here and now of perceiving and acting. This chapter considers how the spatial perseveration characteristic of babies may play a positive role in keeping track of objects and, indeed, in binding names to objects.

An understanding of mechanical function, of cause and effect between physical events, is called in everyday language ‘understanding how things work’. This can include knowledge of object properties, relationships between objects, how to achieve modifications, and how things are constructed. Several lines of evidence imply insight of this in some animals. This chapter shows that all the great apes, but probably no other animals, can comprehend the simple cause-and-effect relationships that govern the use of objects to solve problems: this requires that they have symbolic representations of objects. The mental and manual capabilities of these animals evidently support tool-using and tool-making under certain circumstances. Object permanence, solving problems with the insightful use of objects, explorative play with objects, and tool-using and tool-making are discussed.

This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who argues that objects are central to the developing infant's capacity to relate to the world as an external reality. According to Winnicott, the baby needs its transitional object (the blanket, a toy) to supply it with a kind of object-ivity, or realness. The baby learns about the existence of an external world when it destroys/disavows the object and the object survives. This is object permanence. The chapter also considers the views of Wendy Brown, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt in the context of decades of charting the almost always already overness of democracy's (or of politics') necessary conditions.

This chapter addresses the issue of what happens during development by defining development from the perspective of organismic-developmental theory. The chapter begins by summarizing the common practice of defining development in terms of age-based change and change over time. It is argued that not all changes over time are necessarily developmental changes and that analyzing development in terms of age-based milestones obfuscates cultural variability as well as ongoing developmental processes. Therefore, more specific criteria for developmental change and for analyzing dynamic developmental processes are required. The organismic-developmental conceptualization of development in terms of increasing differentiation and integration in relation to cultural goals of development is explained. This conceptualization permits analysis of ongoing developmental processes and of interindividual and intraindividual variability in development. To illustrate the processes of differentiation and integration, the development of object permanence and life span self/identity development are analyzed from an organismic-developmental perspective.

This book examines democratic theory in the context of object relations and asks whether democracy might be constitutively dependent on public things. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's object-relations theory, in which objects have seemingly magic powers of integration and adhesion, and Hannah Arendt's account of the work of homo faber, the book thinks out loud about things (or “things out loud”) and their contributions to democratic politics. It considers Winnicott's “transitional objects,” “holding environments,” “object permanence,” and “good enough” (m)others as well as Arendt's ideas about the durability and permanence that “things” bring to the contingency and flux of the human world of action. The basic argument is that democracy is rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things.

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the sixth month of life. As her son begins to eat solid foods for the first time, the author marvels at how quickly and easily he learned to eat. The remainder of the chapter focuses on infant cognition and learning, discussing how we might investigate what preverbal infants understand, what they know, and how they come to know it. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of play in learning and how parents’ use of guided play might give infants a bit of a boost.