Infants develop an avoidance reaction to the appearance of depth by the age of 8 to 10 months, when they begin to crawl. This discovery was made on the surface of an apparatus called the visual cliff. The latter is a table divided into two halves, with its entire top covered by glass. One half of the top has a checkerboard pattern lying immediately underneath the glass; the other half is transparent and reveals a sharp drop of a metre or so, at the bottom of which is the same checkerboard pattern. The infant is placed on a board on the centre of the table. The mother stands across the table and tries to tempt her baby to cross the glass on either the shallow or the deep side.
Infants younger than seven months will unhesitatingly crawl to the mother across the deep side, but infants older than eight months avoid the deep side and refuse to cross it. The crying and anxiety that eight-month-olds display when confronted with the need to cross the deep side are the result of their ability to perceive depth but also, and more importantly, their ability to recognize the discrepancy of sitting on a solid surface while nevertheless seeing the visual bottom some distance below. Both nervous-system maturation and experience contribute to this particular cognitive advance.
source: Encyclopedia Britannica
9 Comments
siftbotTags for this video have been changed from 'child, development, experiment, psychology' to 'child, development, experiment, psychology, social, referencing' - edited by jonny
jonnyCognitive development is fascinating. Good description, since the video doesn't do much to explain the details, or show the younger infants that will cross. I added "social referencing" in the tags because, while it's not directly demonstrated in this video, it has been shown in experiments using the same setup.
mauz15>> ^jonny:
Cognitive development is fascinating. Good description, since the video doesn't do much to explain the details, or show the younger infants that will cross. I added "social referencing" in the tags because, while it's not directly demonstrated in this video, it has been shown in experiments using the same setup.
By social referencing, you mean what? like the kids relying on nonverbal communication from their parents or....?
jonny>> ^mauz15:
>> ^jonny:
I added "social referencing" in the tags because, while it's not directly demonstrated in this video, it has been shown in experiments using the same setup.
By social referencing, you mean what? like the kids relying on nonverbal communication from their parents or....?
Exactly that. In other experiments using the same "visual cliff" setup, the mothers were instructed to show encouraging, fearful, or neutral faces to their infants when on the cliff side. Subjects would often ignore the visual clues of the "cliff" and cross anyway when mothers showed an encouraging face, and were even less likely to cross when mothers showed a fearful face rather than a neutral one.
The point was to demonstrate just how powerful social cues are in development - they can actually override instinctual sensory cues.
XaxMy boys are nearing 18 months, and I'm constantly caught by surprise at how smart they are. It's really quite amazing how intelligent they are even when they're very young.
Some people are a bit surprised when they see that we'll let them run around and stand on the ledge of the couch, for example. We're taking more of a hands-off approach rather than "don't let them do anything remotely dangerous," and it's rewarding to see just how much they can accomplish without our meddling.
doogleyes,
but just think about how many infants had to die for the rest to instinctively 'know'.
Never forget, the lost infants. *eia
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