Depth Perception, an Inborn Skill? :: essays research papers

In 1960, Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk conducted an experiment to see whether prudence perception is an inborn or a learned skill in globe. They conducted their experiment with a table that had a thick glass cake on half of the table and a solid base on the other half. This created an illusion of a small cliff without the dangers of actually falling. In this experiment, infants ranging from the age of 6 to 14 months were placed on the solid locating of the table. The infants mothers were placed on the other side of table and were there to chatter the infants to the other side. Of the 30 infants tested, 27 of them crossed the glass surface when called piece only 3 refused. Gibson and Walk conducted the same experiment on immature chickens and goats with astonishing results. When chickens and goats were placed on the solid side, non a star one of them made an error to cross the cliff. The same test was conducted on baby rats whose results f bed far worse than the results o f the chickens and goats. The rats fared worse because they are nocturnal animals who assert on other senses other than vision to direct them. From this experiment, Gibson and Walk conclude that depth perception was inborn to all animals and humans by the sentence they achieve independent movement. This is in the case of chickens and goats at birth and for humans at around 6 months of age.The results of Gibson and Walks experiment are very questionable because their control group did not consist of whatever socially dependant animals. Infants are socially dependent of their mother for survival and nurturing throughout their childhood. Gibson and Walk should have conducted their control experiment on socially dependant animals such as elephants or cheetahs instead of animals that do not rely heavily on their caretaker. In 1985, Sorce, Emde, Campos, and Klinnert conducted the same visual cliff experiment with human infants and their mothers. This time, the mother was instructed to maintain an expression of fear or happiness on the other side of the cliff.