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WATCH OUT FOR THE VISUAL

CLIFF!
MEGI BRAHO
4TH HOUR
5/7/2019
E.J. GIBSON

• Eleanor J. Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development


and perceptual learning in infants and toddlers. She was born in Peoria, IL on December
7, 1910 and passed away on December 30,2002.
• Gibson Had many legacy's such as the Gibsonian ecological theory of development in
(1960-1970)
• In 1977 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• In 1992 she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
In order to investigate depth perception, E.J Gibson and R.D. walker developed the visual
cliff test to use with human infants.
HISTORY/UNDERSTANDING OF THE VISUAL CLIFF
In earlier studies researchers had said that infants respond to various depth cues even before they can crawl. There are
two types of cues:

Monocular Cues
Relative size and overlap
Binocular Cues
Retinal disparity
Gibson described their visual cliff as a large sheet of heavy plexiglass which supported a foot or more off the floor.
A material is laid on the floor below the glass, creating the visual illusion perception while still ensuring the safety of
infants.

The perception of the visual cliff was a matter of visual maturity. Babies less than 8 months would not be able to see
the cliff.
INFANT TEST

• A child is placed on one end of the platform and the caregiver stands on the
other side of the clear surface. If the child had developed depth perception,
he or she would be able to see the visual cliff and would refuse to crawl.
• The infants who lacked depth perception would crawl happily to their
caregivers without noticing anything.
• Infants learn gain the experience of being afraid of heights when they fall
and get hurt.
IMPACT

• In particular the visual cliff is a more


general experimental procedure of
placing infants in front of obstacles and
observing their behavior
• It was also used on animals
• Rats avoid the deep side of the cliff for 27-
90 days
• At 140-300 days if they were still scared it
caused a permanent deficit.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS

• Statistics in infants show that


• 9 of the infants did not move off the center board
• The ones who moved, only moved because their mothers called them
• Statistics in animals show that
• All the chicks under 24 children either crawled to the shallow side or cried because they
couldn’t cross the shallow part
• Four week kittens preferred the shallow side and would freeze up when they were put on
the deep side.
DEPTH PERCEPTION = MOST VISUAL SKILL
DEPTH PERCEPTION = MOST VISUAL SKILL
 S.B. had been blind his entire life until the age
of 52.
He got a corneal transplant and his vision was
restored
WHAT WAS After that his ability to see was not how ours is
THE STORY OF He looked outside his room and was curious about
S.B.? the small objects he could see moving on the
ground below
He tried to crawl and put his hands out the window
to touch them but the staff caught him because he
was about to jump in moving traffic.
THEORETICAL PROPOSITIONS

• If you wanted to find out at what point in the development process animals or
people are able to perceive depth:
• Put them on the edge of the visual cliff and see if they would fall off.
• There is no actual cliff, it just appears like that to see their depth perception
• Gibson believed that the depth perception and the avoidance of a drop –off
appear automatically as part of our original biological equipment.

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