Watch Out for The Visual Cliff Eleanor Jack Gibson and Richard Walk were a pair of American psychologists who studied the development of depth perceptions in human infants. Their interests emerged after an incident regarding a man (known only as S.B. due to privacy concerns) who was blind since birth till the age of 52 recovered after a new surgical procedure that allowed him to see again, however post-surgery S.B. almost fell out of a window due to under-developed perception of depth before nurses rushed over to pull him away quickly.
THERORETICAL PROPOSITIONS In 1960, the Psychologist community has always favored that humans were born with the skill of depth perception and not taught. However, Gibson and Walk thought otherwise and believed depth perception
in infants had to be learned through experience instead of just being born with it.
METHOD Gibson and Walks held multiple trials on several infants from many different species including puppies, kittens, turtles, and human babies ranging around the 6-month mark. The subjects were put on a center board with one upper part of the board being identical visually to a lower part of the board which was underneath the first one. A glass pane was placed over the lower board to act as a precaution to prevent injury. They were observed to learn whether or not they could distinguish the difference sides and find out if depth perception was something that infants could be born with.
CONCLUSTION Nature Vs Nurture is a heavy concept when defining the results of this experiment. From the
beginning Gibson and Walk had sided with the “Nurture” side of things believing that depth perception was sought out by experience, while most of the psychologist community saw “the nature of human abilities”. Gibson and Walk found during their trials that many of the tests were inconclusive since the subjects did not even participate in the exam, crawled over the glass to their mothers, or just cried. Due to this, it was difficult to assess with human babies. However, the animal babies did show that depth perception was already developed despite being new-born. Overall the topic is inconclusive for human infants because it is difficult to determine whether it is developed at such a young age, before 6 months their locomotion skills are not developed enough.