Discuss the developmental features of object permanence and attachment.

It was Bowlby�s work after the war that began the swing away from the behaviourists� notion that babies depend on the adults around them purely for physical nourishment. It is this need for a secure base which underpins infants� astounding ability to assimilate sensory information into a coherent picture of their environment, which eventually extends to a comprehension of the independent and permanent existence of objects around them.

�Attachment�, i.e. the successful social relationships which children form, especially with their parents, can be understood in terms of evolutionary psychology as simply a means for the infant to make itself more attractive to those on whom it depends completely for survival.

Robertson�s film of a two-year old girl�s unhappiness at being separated from her mother when taken to hospital led Bowlby to theorise a three-part sequence of distress followed by protest and apathy.

His ensuing work with the �forty-five thieves�, a group of delinquents of which an unusually large number came from broken homes or had endured periods of separation from their parents, led him to his conclusions about monotropy. He later developed this ground-breaking assertion that early attachment to one particular person is important because it provides children with love; he cited affectionless psychopathy as one possible (and extreme) long-term consequence of a lack of a good relationship, usually with the infant�s mother, in the early years.

Bowlby�s work proved tremendously influential, as well as benefiting from a variety of animal-based work, such as� Lorenz�s memorable demonstrations of irreversible imprinting in ducklings. Bowlby�s acceptance of the idea of strong innate drives for social contacts with parents drew weight from Harlow�s work with very young Rhesus monkeys (which are statistically one of the species closest to man genetically, although this alone is not sufficient to vindicate direct comparison across species). The monkeys were separated from their mothers and given a choice between two artificial mothers, one with a wire teat providing food representing physical sustenance while the other gave visual and tactual support. The monkeys� obvious preference for the cloth mother, to which Harlow ascribed the role of a �secure base�, prompted Ainsworth�s �strange situation� as an attempt to objectively measure the quality of a mother/infant relationship.

Ainsworth believed that the infant�s primary motivation is for security, which it obtains through a range of successful or unsuccessful relationships, and she posited four criteria of a secure attachment:

1. active play & exploration in the caregiver�s presence

2. enthusiastic greetings on reunion after separation

3. effectiveness of contact when distressed

4. absence of anger, petulance or with-holding of contact

Her strange situation, involving a sequence of events leaving a baby in an alien environment with and without its mother and/or a stranger, led her to classify three groups of babies: the anxious-avoidant; securely-attached; and the anxious-ambivalent. This gradation led to a reassessment of the position that it�s not simply a traumatic separation, but the whole range and quality of infant attachments which affects adult life, through work such as Bremner�s, who showed that eighteen-month old securely-attached children are more independent in the classroom at four years old, as well as other evidence linking the way the mothers behave with the child�s group.

Bretherton used a different technique to provide implicit evidence of a trusting relationship between mother and child, by telling a story with concrete material identifying the child with one of the characters. When the �mother� character returns, and the child is asked �what happened next?�, Bretheron used the responses to demonstrate trust in the mother-figure to protect the child-character.

Ainsworth continued her work with Bell by demonstrating a negative correlation between the number of episodes when the mother responds to the infant�s crying to the frequency of the baby�s crying. This provided much-needed evidence to confront the behavioural theory that picking children up reinforced their crying.

Piaget became interested in how the nature of children�s understanding of the physical and social world around them changes as they grow older, arguing that young children construct their knowledge through interaction with their environment, based on certain built-in behaviours (reflexes) such as looking, sucking and moving.

He defined five stages of development, starting from the first six months of life during which babies first conceive a difference between themselves and objects around them. However, they do not yet understand that objects have a continuous and independent existence, and still live in a capricious unpredictable world filled with objects which are dependent on their own actions.

By stage 3, usually reached between six and nine months, the baby displays interest in a variety of objects and have developed a repertoire of movements. They perform the �not searching� error, by which it is meant that they lose interest in a covered object because they do not understand that the covered object still exists, and even if they retrieve a partially-covered object, Piaget argues that they somehow believe that it is their own movements which have reconstituted the missing bits.

By stage 4, even though they will retrieve an object which they have seen being partially covered, having been habituated to finding it in place A, they will display comical surprise to find that it is not still there even after having seen it being visibly removed to place B. This, the �A not B error� of searching in the wrong place, indicates to Piaget a greater but still imperfect understanding as they seem to understand a covered object as being a �thing of the place�. Although the phenomenon of the AB error is not in dispute, there are alternate explanations, such as an inability of the baby�s to actually uncover the object, despite knowing of its hidden existence. Bower and Baillargeon looked at the baby�s heart rate and surprise respectively in different experiments to try and determine whether the baby�s difficulty was simply one of knowing how to uncover the object. In order to do this, Baillargeon measured the differences in the length of time babies spent gazing at an ostensibly impossible/possible event, working on the premise that babies� gaze is an indicator of their interest (in this case based on the preference for novelty) in an object. His results indicated that they looked consistently more at the impossible events where an object appeared to have disappeared, indicating surprise and consequently a conception of its permanence, all of which goes against Piaget�s explanation. Butterworth�s work, exposing the assumption that the AB error was somehow linked to the infant�s misconception of permanence showed that the mistake is still made when the object is not hidden or covered in its container, but remains wholly visible.

At stage 5, after approximately a year, the child no longer makes the AB error but does not yet make inferences about invisible displacement, i.e. where an object of known placement is surreptitiously swapped into a different container.

If Baillargeon is right, stage 3 babies do have an understanding of the continued existence and solidity of hidden objects, but this still does not fully resolve Piaget�s explanation about their conception of objects independent of their own actions because the drawbridge�s movement required no input from the observing baby. Although some degree of unceratinty remains concerning the AB error and explanations of the later stages, it does seem reasonable to delineate infants� development into certain obvious behavioural stages; however, inferences considering the cognitive development giving rise to the infants� curious relationship to its environment are inevitably more debatable.

With respect to attachment, Bowlby�s ideas about the importance of stable relationships certainly played a vital role in moving social psychology away from its behaviourist stance in the �60s. As to the strange situation�s attempts at an object measure of attachment, although it could be partly a measure of personality as well as strength of the mother-child relationship, it too goes a considerable distance towards enhancing our understanding of the features and significance of infant attachment.

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