topic 3

• to study perception in children habituation can be used. this is the idea infants will get used to looking at familiar stimuli but will show interest in novel stimuli. preferential looking is the tendency for babies to prefer to look at new things.
• to study perception in animals selective rearing can be used which blakemore and cooper used.
• Gibson and Walk aimed to investigate how humans and animals perceive height distance which is a form of perception.
• the sample was 36 infants aged 6 to 14 months. also tested a range of animals including rats, kittens and turtles.
• the method used was a lab experiment
• the procedure set up is known as the visual cliff. this has a shallow side and a cliff side.
• in human trials the infant was placed in the centre of the board and the mother called to the baby from the cliff then the shallow side.
• in the animals trials some kittens were reared in darkness for a month.
• in control trials there were changed to the lighting, material and height distance for each side
• the separation of visual cues was measured in two ways. relative size is the more distant an object is the smaller the image will be. motion parallax is as we move objects closer move quicker then ones in the distance.
• the human trials found that 27 infants moved off the board all crawled to shallow side at least once. only 3 babies crawled to the deep cliff side. babies depth perception matured quicker then ability to physically move
• in the animal trials the kittens reared in darkness were equally likely to move to either side. after a week under normal conditions they behaved normally.
• Gibson and Walk concluded that both nature and nurture influence development of depth perception. Binocular cues like motion parallax are innate and monocular cues like size consistency are learned.
• a strategy to help develop perception is sensory integrative therapy. this involves devising a specified programme for a particular child and doing activities to help like listening to music.