Abstract: Object persistence refers to the phenomena that an individual encountered at present is the same as the individual encountered earlier. There are several accounts of such object persistence in the literature: similarity theory, spatiotemporal theory, sortal theory, and causal theory. Some issues as to spatiotemporal persistence and surface cues together with sortal and causal persistence are discussed. Future researches should focus on the establishment of the experimental paradigm of similarity, sortal, causal theories, the improvement in the design for spatiotemporal, sortal and causal theories and the development of research on object persistence from visual domain to olfactive, audio, etc.

Key words: object persistence, similarity theory, spatiotemporal theory, sortal theory, causal theory