Object permanence. In the last 35 years, the baby’s representation of objects has been re-explored with striking results. A landmark study (Baillargeon et al. 1985) used the violation-of-expectancy paradigm to test the Piagetian claim that infants lack object permanence. Five-month-old infants were shown a screen that rotated 180 degrees up from the surface of a table and back again to its initial position. In the habituation phase, the babies got used to the screen motion and their looking time