Object Permanence

It rained most of the morning today, so Pat and I spent some time talking about research and trying to figure out what we want to investigate. We were going along the track of looking at equine ability to follow a point -- based off of the current research on canine, primate, marine mammal, and other species, but we found something even more simple that needs to be documented in horses: Object Permanence.

Object permanence is the cognitive understanding that an object still exists, even if it gets hidden from view. Piaget described 6 stages of object permanence in child development, which go from a lack of object awareness (Stage 1 - infants 0-1 month of age) all the way up to developing mental representations of objects and working with them in your head to solve problems (Stage 6 - reached by around 18-24 months in human toddlers).

Although there have been some controversial discussions on the issue, the general consensus in dog research is that it seems likely that dogs are capable of reaching Stage 6 Object Permanence. They join great apes and certain species of parrots (e.g. the African Grey) in reaching this higher level of cognition.
(Edit: After some further reading, looks like I was wrong about the general consensus -- or just a couple decades off! More recent studies suggest that dogs' ability to succeed in paradigms designed to study Stage 6 Object Permanence are more likely due to dogs using associative learning and spatial cues to solve these tasks instead of using mental representations to infer invisible displacement of objects)

It would be really interesting to see how the horses do on tasks that would shed some light on what level of object permanence horses have. Basic spatial memory tasks have shown that horses do seem to be able to search for hidden food, suggesting that they have at least Stage 4 object permanence (the individual is able to retrieve an object completely hidden from view). Before Stage 4, individuals would not be able to retain the information that an object exists in a particular location if it is completely out of view. This is what makes peek-a-boo so much fun to little kids, whose object permanence is not yet fully developed and it seems like Mommy is magically disappearing and reappearing right before his eyes!

Can't wait to really solidify our testing protocol and start collecting data on the animals. We should probably be able to run the tests on the horses, donkeys, mules, and maybe even Spot :) Should be fun!