# Object permanence in newborn chicks is robust against opposing evidence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Towards World Simulator: Crafting Physical Commonsense-Based Benchmark for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05363/) (2024)
- [Can Vision Language Models Learn Intuitive Physics from Interaction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06033/) (2026)
- [Modeling The Object Representations Underlying Human Physical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12486/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Newborn animals have advanced perceptual skills at birth, but the nature of this initial knowledge is unknown. Is initial knowledge flexible, continuously adapting to the statistics of experience? Or can initial knowledge be rigid and robust to change, even in the face of opposing evidence? We address this question through controlled-rearing experiments on newborn chicks. First, we reared chicks in an impoverished virtual world, where objects never occluded one another, and found that chicks still succeed on object permanence tasks. Second, we reared chicks in a virtual world in which objects teleported from one location to another while out of view: an unnatural event that violates the continuity of object motion. Despite seeing thousands of these violations of object permanence, and not a single non-violation, the chicks behaved as if object permanence were true, exhibiting the same behavior as chicks reared with natural object permanence events. We conclude that object permanence develops prenatally and is robust to change from opposing evidence.