PSYCH 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4, 17, 18: Depth Perception

• School: UMASS-Amherst
• Department: Psychology & Brain Sciences
• Course: PSYCH 100
• Professor: Rahhal Tamara

Document Summary

Reading 4: the visual cliff (gibson and walk) Our visual ability to sense and interpret the world around us an area of interest to experimental psychologists because it affects our behavior in important ways. Visual cliff- avoids this problem of people who are unable to perceive depth or specifically, height. Gibson and walk took a nativist position and believed that depth perception and the avoidance of a drop-off appear automatically as part of our original biological equipment and are not produced from experience. 36 infants were tested on an experiment where it looked like there was a drop: 7 of them wouldn"t pass, 3 crept past the ledge with great hesitation, 24 crawled with no hesitation. The results don"t prove that depth perception is innate and not learned. Many different animals were tested and most of them did have depth perception: only rats showed differently.