Object permanence in cats and dogs compared

This early comparative study assessed how cats and dogs solve visible and invisible displacement tasks, the benchmarks Piaget used to chart object permanence in human infants. Both species succeeded at visible displacements, tracking an object hidden behind a single screen, but performance on invisible displacements, where the object is moved while concealed, was more limited and error-prone. The work established that carnivores reach an advanced but not fully human stage of object permanence and set the methodological template for decades of follow-up studies probing how cats represent objects that disappear from view, a capacity highly relevant to ambush predation.