THE PERSISTING ENVIRONMENT; PERSISTENCE, COEXISTENCE, AND CONCURRENCE
To say that one is aware of the environment behind one’s head is to say that one is aware of the persistence of the environment. Things go out of sight and come into sight as the head turns in looking around, but they persist while out of sight. Whatever leaves the field as one turns to the right re-enters the field as one turns to the left. The structure that is deleted is later accreted; this is a reversible transition, and therefore the structure can be said to be invariant under the transition. To pick up the invariant is to perceive the persistence of a surface, so my argument runs. If this is true, there is no need to appeal to a concept of “object permanence” or to any theory of how the concept might develop.
To perceive the persistence of surfaces that are out of sight is also to perceive their coexistence with those that are in sight. In short, the hidden is continuous with the unhidden; they are connected.
Separated places and objects are perceived to coexist. This means that separated events at these places are perceived to be concurrent. What happens at one end of a corridor is seen to co-occur with what happens at the other end, even though one must look back and forth between the two. Different concurrent events, thus, can be sampled in succession without destroying their concurrence, just as different coexisting places can be sampled in succession without destroying their coexistence.
(Gibson, J.J. (1986) The ecological approach to visual perception. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. pp. 208-209)
