| Course | PAC 201 Child Development |
|---|---|
| Module | Module 4 |
| Paper type | Infant cognition paper |
| Length | About 1,100 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Aspen University |
| Program | Psychology and Addiction Studies |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for PAC 201 Module 4
What Babies Know When the Toy Disappears: Piaget, Looking-Time Research and the Limits of What Infants Can Tell Us
Student Name
Psychology and Addiction Studies Program, Aspen University
PAC 201: Child Development
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
What Babies Know When the Toy Disappears: Piaget, Looking-Time Research and the Limits of What Infants Can Tell Us
In the infant room at Desert Sprouts Early Learning Center, a fictional Tucson center, Leo, seven months old, sits propped on a mat and reaches eagerly for a soft toy rabbit. His teacher, playing, drops a small blanket over the rabbit. Leo stares at the blanket for a moment, then turns away and picks up a teething ring. Two months later, the same game produces a different response: Leo pulls the blanket off and grabs the rabbit, laughing. What changed in Leo's understanding between seven and nine months? This paper examines that question through Piaget's account of infant thinking and the research that followed it. Leo and the center are illustrations made up for this paper, while the studies are real.
Piaget's Sensorimotor Infant
Piaget described infancy as the sensorimotor stage, in which infants understand the world through their senses and actions. Over the first two years, infants move from reflexes to repeated actions, to intentional behavior, to experimentation and finally to mental representation. A central achievement is object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when they cannot be seen. Piaget observed that young infants, like Leo at seven months, stop searching when a toy is covered, as if it no longer exists; around eight or nine months, they begin to search. He concluded that object permanence develops gradually and is not complete until the second year. In his view, infants build knowledge through their own actions.
Seeing Depth
Some perceptual abilities appear early. Gibson and Walk (1960) built the visual cliff, a glass-topped table with a checkerboard pattern directly beneath the glass on one side and far below it on the other, creating the appearance of a drop. Most crawling infants, between about six and fourteen months, would crawl across the shallow side to their mothers but refused to cross the deep side, even when their mothers called them. Many peered down through the glass and backed away. The study showed that by the time infants crawl, most can perceive depth and avoid an apparent drop. Later research suggested that experience with crawling plays a role in how infants respond to heights, linking perception to motor development.
Looking Time and Object Permanence
Later researchers asked whether Piaget's searching tasks underestimated infants. Searching requires an infant to plan and coordinate actions, which young infants may not be able to do even if they understand that the toy still exists. Baillargeon et al. (1985) used a different method, based on looking time. Infants tend to look longer at events that surprise them. Five-month-olds watched a screen rotate back and forth like a drawbridge. Then a box was placed behind the screen. In the possible event, the screen stopped when it reached the hidden box. In the impossible event, the screen seemed to rotate through the space the box occupied. Infants looked longer at the impossible event, which the researchers interpreted as evidence that the infants expected the hidden box to continue to exist and to block the screen. Their findings suggested that object permanence, in some form, appears months earlier than Piaget proposed.
Critics have argued that longer looking may reflect perceptual novelty or familiarity rather than understanding, and the interpretation of looking-time studies remains debated. Still, the research showed that what infants do with their hands may lag behind what they perceive.
Imitation at Birth?
Another claim that challenged Piaget concerned imitation. Piaget believed that imitating facial gestures, which requires matching a seen action to an unseen movement of one's own face, appeared months after birth. Meltzoff and Moore (1977) reported that infants as young as two to three weeks imitated adults who stuck out their tongues, opened their mouths or protruded their lips. The finding was widely cited as evidence that infants are born with the capacity to connect what they see with what they do.
Oostenbroek et al. (2016) tested this claim in a large longitudinal study, following more than one hundred infants and testing them at one, three, six and nine weeks of age with nine different gestures. They found no evidence that newborns imitated: infants produced gestures such as tongue protrusion just as often when the adult modeled a different gesture as when the adult modeled the matching one. The authors concluded that earlier positive findings may have reflected methodological limitations, such as small samples and testing few gestures.
Comparing the Claims
| Claim | Study and method | Evidence | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Object permanence develops around eight to twelve months | Piaget, observation of searching | Young infants stop searching for covered objects | Searching does lag; understanding may be earlier |
| Crawling infants perceive depth | Gibson and Walk, visual cliff | Most refused the deep side | Well supported, with a role for experience |
| Five-month-olds expect hidden objects to persist | Baillargeon and colleagues, looking time | Longer looking at an impossible event | Influential; interpretation debated |
| Newborns imitate facial gestures | Meltzoff and Moore, imitation tests | Matching gestures reported | Challenged by a large longitudinal study |
| No newborn imitation | Oostenbroek and colleagues, longitudinal, many gestures | No matching beyond chance | Currently the stronger evidence |
What Leo Knows
Read through this research, Leo's turning away at seven months may not mean that the rabbit has ceased to exist for him. He may lack the ability to plan and carry out a search, or his attention may simply move to the next interesting thing. By nine months, his growing ability to coordinate actions lets him show what he knows. Piaget's observation of the behavior was accurate; the debate concerns what it means.
Implications for Caregivers
The research suggests modest, practical lessons. Infants are active learners who benefit from games like peekaboo and hiding toys, which give them practice with objects that disappear and reappear. Caregivers can follow infants' attention and expand on what interests them. Products or videos claiming to accelerate infant cognition are not supported by this research. And infants' understanding may exceed what they can show, so caregivers should not assume that a baby who cannot yet do something does not perceive or understand anything about it.
Conclusion
Leo's response to a hidden rabbit changed between seven and nine months, and researchers have long debated what that change means. Piaget saw object permanence developing through action, Gibson and Walk showed early depth perception, Baillargeon, Spelke and Wasserman suggested that infants understand more than they can show and the story of newborn imitation, from Meltzoff and Moore to Oostenbroek and colleagues, shows how research corrects itself. Infant cognition remains a field where careful methods matter as much as bold claims.
References
Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E. S., & Wasserman, S. (1985). Object permanence in five-month-old infants. Cognition, 20(3), 191-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90008-3
Gibson, E. J., & Walk, R. D. (1960). The "visual cliff." Scientific American, 202(4), 64-71. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0460-64
Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198(4312), 75-78. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.198.4312.75
Oostenbroek, J., Suddendorf, T., Nielsen, M., Redshaw, J., Kennedy-Costantini, S., Davis, J., Clark, S., & Slaughter, V. (2016). Comprehensive longitudinal study challenges the existence of neonatal imitation in humans. Current Biology, 26(10), 1334-1338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.047
Reading the PAC 201 Module 4 assignment instructions
Infant cognition comes next in PAC 201, and a fourth-module paper generally asks you to describe what infants perceive and understand and to weigh classic theory against later research. Defer to the wording of your Aspen course's Module 4 prompt; the child is invented. Explain Piaget's sensorimotor stage accurately. Describe the methods researchers use with infants, such as looking time, and what they can show. Present studies that challenged Piaget and studies that challenged those challenges. Compare claims systematically. Connect the research to an observed infant, and give practical implications for caregivers, citing every study in APA 7 and noting where findings are still debated. Record the child's age in months.
How this PAC 201 Module 4 example is built
Leo watches a toy rabbit disappear under a blanket and turns away. Piaget's sensorimotor stage would read that as a lack of object permanence. Gibson and Walk's Scientific American article on the visual cliff shows depth perception in crawling infants. Baillargeon, Spelke and Wasserman's Cognition study uses looking time to suggest five-month-olds expect hidden objects to persist. Meltzoff and Moore's Science article reports newborn imitation, and Oostenbroek and colleagues' Current Biology study of over one hundred infants finds none. A five-row table compares claims and methods. The debate over what looking time means is weighed, and implications for play and caregiving close it, including a caution about products that promise smarter babies.
Reading the PAC 201 Module 4 grading rubric
Infant cognition papers earn credit for accurate accounts of Piaget and of later research, for understanding methods and for weighing evidence. This example explains why looking time can reveal knowledge that searching does not, and why critics question that interpretation. Including both the newborn imitation report and the larger study that failed to find it shows awareness of replication, an important current issue. The table organizes claims and methods for comparison. Implications for caregivers are modest and practical, not inflated claims about building smarter babies. The observation of Leo anchors the debate in a moment any reader who has played peekaboo will recognize. Each study's method is described before its result.
Common PAC 201 Module 4 mistakes, and how to avoid them
Students often present Piaget as simply wrong. His observations were careful, and his account of active learning remains influential; later research mainly suggests that infants know some things earlier than his methods could detect. Explain methods such as looking time, and their limits. Include replication problems where they exist, such as with newborn imitation. Compare claims systematically. Avoid popular claims that products or videos make babies smarter. When you describe an infant you observed, record behavior objectively and note the child's age in months. Use primary sources for classic studies. Finally, say where the debate stands now rather than presenting one side as the final word. Note sample sizes where they matter, as in the imitation studies.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
This paper is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Aspen University document. Read it for the moves, then write your own to the instructions in your classroom. If you want one built to your exact prompt and rubric, the first custom sample is free and arrives in 24 to 48 hours.
More PAC 201 and Psychology and Addiction Studies sample papers
- PAC 201 Module 1: Theories and Research in Child Development
- PAC 201 Module 2: Prenatal Development and Birth
- PAC 201 Module 3: Physical and Brain Development in Infancy
- PAC 201 Module 5: Language Development
- PAC 201 Module 6: Emotional and Social Development
- PAC 201 Module 7: Moral Development
- PAC 201 Module 8: Children's Care, Diversity and Careers
- PAC 102 Module 2: Risk and Protective Factors
- PAC 310 Module 6: Scope of Practice and Competence
- PAC 110 Module 1: Models of Addiction Across History
- PAC 240 Module 7: Relapse Prevention
PAC 201 Module 4 questions, answered
What does PAC 201 Module 4 usually ask for?
Aspen's PAC 201 covers perception and cognition in the first years here, so comparing Piaget's account with later infant research is typical. Read the Module 4 prompt.
What is object permanence?
The understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight. Piaget placed it around eight months; Baillargeon and colleagues' looking-time study suggested earlier understanding.
What is the visual cliff?
Gibson and Walk's apparatus with a glass surface over an apparent drop; most crawling infants would not cross the deep side even when their mothers called.
Where can I find a free PAC 201 Module 4 sample paper?
Read it free on this page: infant perception and cognition from Piaget to looking-time research, with a table comparing claims and methods.
Do newborns really imitate?
Meltzoff and Moore reported they do, but Oostenbroek and colleagues' larger longitudinal study found no evidence of newborn imitation.