Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk built the visual cliff, an apparatus with a checkerboard pattern directly beneath a sheet of thick glass on one side and the same pattern set far below the glass on the other, creating the visual appearance of a sudden drop with no actual difference in surface safety. Testing crawling-age infants on it in 1960, they asked whether depth perception is learned through experience with falling or present from early in development.
Facts
Key FindingMost infants aged six to fourteen months refused to crawl across the apparent deep side of the apparatus even when their mother called them from across it, though the surface was solid glass throughout, showing that human infants perceive depth and avoid an apparent drop by the time they are mobile. 2 Method
Study DesignControlled Experiment (Lab or Field) 1 Participants Connections
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Sources
1. Visual cliff (Wikipedia)
2. Wikipedia: Visual cliff
Wikimedia FoundationOriginal study sectionQuote, Original study section
The researchers found that 27 of the infants crawled over to their mother on the 'shallow' side without any problems.
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