Final answer:
According to current research, 10-month old infants' failure to correctly look for a hidden toy during the A-not-B task is not due to a lack of object permanence but rather a struggle with spatial reasoning. This suggests that spatial reasoning, or the ability to understand and remember the relative locations of objects in the spatial environment, is still under development at this age.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question pertains to a behavior in developmental psychology known as the A-not-B error, often observed in infants around 8-12 months of age. This error occurs when infants reach for an object in a location where it was previously found (Location A) even after observing it being hidden in a different location (Location B). It is considered a classic index of object permanence. According to recent research on the A-not-B error, the reason 10-month-olds fail to recover the hidden toy is not because they lack object permanence but instead they struggle with spatial reasoning (Option B).
The spatial reasoning here pertains to an infant's ability to understand and remember the relative locations of objects in the spatial environment, which seems to be under development in infants of this age. Findings by researchers such as Baillargeon (1987), suggest that infants at this stage have an understanding of objects but struggle with reasoning about the spatial properties of a hidden object, hence, when the object's position changes, they tend to reach out to the initial location instead of the new one.
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