Yeah I had thought that newborns famously didnt understand object permanence and that it developed sometime during their first year. And that was why peekaboo is fun, you’re essentially popping in and out of existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence#Contradictin...
That contradicts this contradiction, unless there is another explanation.
"Why were you throwing the baseball at the running fan?" "I don't know...I was bored."
I don’t understand how you learned this. Who told you that’s what was going on in his head?
A paper from 2014 is not so sure this is a settled matter:
"Infant object permanence is still an enigma after four decades of research. Is it an innate endowment, a developmental attainment, or an abstract idea not attributable to non-verbal infants?"
and argues that object permanence is not in fact innate but developed:
"It is argued that object permanence is not innately specified, but develops. The theory proposed here is that object permanence is an attainment that grows from a developmentally prior understanding of object identity"
"In sum, it is posited that permanence is initially dependent on the nature of the occlusion; with development, it becomes a property of objects. Even for 10–12-month-olds, object permanence is still a work-in-progress, manifested on one disappearance transformation but not another."
Peekaboo is fun because fun is fun. When doing peekaboo the other person is paying attention to you, and often smiling and being relaxed.
They laugh just as much if you play ‘peekaboo’ without actually covering your face ;)