Eleanor Gibson
Background: Perceptual development in children and how this can be studied in babies & animals
Key Study: Gibson & Walk (1960)
Application: Develop perception in young children
Key Study: Gibson & Walk (1960)
Application: Develop perception in young children
Background: Cognition
Turning the perception of the world around us into cognition is a remarkable act that we often take for granted. This process involves taking external stimuli in the world, processing it through the biology of our bodies and then turning it into thoughts that happen in our brain.
Background: Perceptual development in children
Background: Pattern perception
Background: Face recognition
Background: Depth perception
Background: Using physiological methods
Background: Using animals to study perceptual development
Background: Examples of animal research
Turning the perception of the world around us into cognition is a remarkable act that we often take for granted. This process involves taking external stimuli in the world, processing it through the biology of our bodies and then turning it into thoughts that happen in our brain.
- Auditory perception starts first with hearing a noise that our eardrums receive, which is then processed into information (for example, recognising the noise of a car).
- Tactile perception is feeling different textures and materials through our fingertips, which is then translated into a thought process (e.g. recognising silk).
- Visual perception is taking information that enters our pupils and being able to recognise objects, colours and depth.
Background: Perceptual development in children
- When first born, babies find it difficult to make sense of the world around them; however, there are some things they recognise quickly.
- If we measure a baby’s interest by how long it looks at an object, newborn babies tend to be more interested when they are presented with new objects rather than objects they have already encountered.
- Even if the new object is similar (e.g. a rectangle after a square) then the child still finds this interesting.
- This could mean that newborn babies can immediately tell the difference when they encounter a new object.
Background: Pattern perception
- When shown patterns, infants prefer complex patterns compared to simple ones. This indicates babies can tell the difference between them (Fantz 1963).
- Newborn babies (as low as under five days old) were also more interested in patterns that resembled human faces. This suggests a biological ability to perceive and recognise faces.
Background: Face recognition
- Other research has also found that babies can pick out faces from a variety of other images.
- In particular, babies are good at recognising their mother’s face, being able to choose it from other female faces. There are limits to this, however. Babies need to see the hairline of the mother to be able to recognise her accurately and they cannot recognise the mother if they only see a profile (her face from the side).
- After 5 months, babies can recognise facial expressions – differentiating between expressions of smiles and fear and even being able to judge the intensity of a smile.
- At 7 months, babies prefer to choose faces that are the right way up instead of upside down, suggesting that as the child learns to sit up correctly they are used to seeing the world the right way round.
- At 9 months, babies can differentiate between genders but only if the face has stereotypical features of that gender (e.g. long hair for women).
- Children who have been raised by male caregivers are better at picking out male faces, suggesting that perception develops with familiarity of what is around them.
Background: Depth perception
- Adults can tell when objects are further away by judging things like the height of the object, the relative size of the object (i.e. objects further away appear smaller) and superimposition (when one object appears in front of another).
- Some researchers have found that 6-week-old infants will display fear when they are lowered into the deep end of a visual cliff (see key research) indicating they can judge distance and depth.
- When studying the development of perception, one key question psychologists want to know is if perceptual development is innate or learned from the environment (nature vs. nurture).
- Fantz in the 1950s measured a child’s interest by timing how long children would stare at stimuli for. The longer they looked, the more interested they were in a stimuli.
- The advantages of this method are that the experimenter can only see where the child is looking and doesn’t necessarily know what the child is looking at (eliminating researcher bias).
- It is also useful, as very small children can be used as they need no training or instructions.
- Video recordings can also be taken of where the child is looking, so independent researchers can verify the timings of where the child looks (increasing inter-rater reliability).
- The disadvantage of this method is that we can only assume that if the child is looking at the stimulus she/he is interested in it. They might be looking in that direction for any number of reasons.
Background: Using physiological methods
- Physiological measures can be used to measure the interest a child has in a stimulus as well.
- This can come in the form of brain scans, blood pressure or measuring heart rates (e.g. slower heart rates often mean interest while faster heart rates mean excitement).
- These methods are as good as machines at giving unbiased, objective measurements.
- Rather than a nominal measure of ‘Is this child looking at the stimulus or not?’, measuring brain activity or heart rate can give more detailed ordinal data and allows questions like ‘How interested is this child in this stimulus?’
- Additional insight into different processing strategies can also be achieved through use of technical equipment.
- However, equipment like this often needs a person to be still and this is notoriously difficult to achieve with babies.
- Exposing infants to equipment that is noisy and frightening is unethical.
Background: Using animals to study perceptual development
- Research into animals is often used when it is unethical to carry out certain experiments on humans.
- This gives researchers a much greater amount of control on studies to make more valid conclusions with.
- However, a difficulty with research on animals is the question of whether or not you can generalise data from animals on humans.
- One way in which researchers have tested visual perceptual development on animals is by controlling how much light animals are exposed to at birth.
Background: Examples of animal research
- Spalding kept baby chickens in black sacks with no light. When released the chicks could run to their mother avoiding obstacles; this implies that the chicks had an innate ability to perceive their environment from birth.
- Lashley and Russell (1934) found a similar finding when they noticed that rats that had been kept in the dark for three months put more effort into jumping over large gaps than smaller gaps (once again implying that these rats had a natural ability to perceive their surroundings).
- Some researchers even went as far as sewing the eyelids of kittens shut. This made them blind, but able to interact with the environment around them. The kittens were kept like this for a time and then their eyes were opened again.
- If the kittens could navigate their environment it showed they had innate perceptual development (nature), if they couldn’t then it revealed that some perception is normally learned from the environment (nurture).
Aim = To document if young animals and children were able to perceive depth and know not to walk off a ‘visual’ cliff.
Human study sample = 36 children aged 6 to 14 months.
Results
Conclusion
Animal studies Results
Discussion
Human study sample = 36 children aged 6 to 14 months.
Results
- 100% of children moved to the shallow side of the cliff to get to their mother.
- 11% of children moved to the deep side of the cliff to get to their mother.
- When first placed on the cliff, children would look over the cliff edge. Some tested the glass for solidarity but didn’t cross.
- When the mother called to them from the deep side of the cliff, the most common reaction was to crawl away from the mother. Others would sit and cry on the shallow side.
Conclusion
- The results showed that children can perceive depth as they appear to be cognitively aware of the edge of the cliff.
- However, this study only tested children when they had started to crawl so you cannot tell for certain whether this depth perception is innate or learned.
Animal studies Results
- The chicks would never cross the cliff.
- Lambs and goats would not cross the deep side (even less than a day after being born). If forced on the deep side, their legs would go limp. When the cliff drop was made smaller (30cm) the goats would cross the deep end.
- At 4 weeks old the kittens wouldn’t cross the deep end, but kittens raised in darkness would walk on either side. Once exposed to light, however, these kittens would within a week avoid the deep side of the cliff.
- The rats used their whiskers to tell there was glass on the deep side of the cliff so would cross it. To avoid this, the shallow end was slightly raised so the rats couldn’t reach the glass with their whiskers. Once this was done 95% wouldn’t cross the deep side. Rats raised in darkness also avoided the deep side.
- Turtles did not mind either the shallow or deep side.
Discussion
- Although the animal studies seem to show an innate ability to develop the perception of depth, you cannot completely generalise to humans. Gibson and Walk do argue that enough animals were tested to make a fair deduction into human perceptual development.
- While it is not ethical to raise children in darkness, the researchers suggest that further study is completed on kittens raised in the dark, and how they change when exposed to light.
Application: A play strategy to develop perception
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Application: Mobiles
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Application: Sensory books
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Application: Sound Bingo
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Application: Shape Sorters
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Application: Dot - to - Dot
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