Piaget’s concept of object permanence is essential to understand. But how did they study this idea among 1 year olds? Obviously children can’t tell you that they believe that something no longer exists when they can’t see it, so how do we know what is going on inside a child’s mind? How about this challenge: do animals also understand object permanence? If you’ve ever seen your cat or dog look under or around objects for a lost toy then yes – you’ve seen that they do understand object permanence.

How can you study object permanence – or a related idea called “expectancy violation” – in animals? Let’s take a look in this 150 episode of The Psych Files.