Perceptual development

Perception is the use of the senses to acquire information or

knowledge about the external world. Questions of
development focus on what capabilities humans have at the
beginning of life and how the growing child comes to
achieve adult levels. Predictions for development based on
this view are that some abilities may be present at birth
and those that emerge later are based on a fine-tuning of
perceptual processes rather than the emergence of those
processes. A complete story of perceptual development
takes into account, physical maturation, the role of
experience, and a developing sensitivity to information.
Approaches to Perception: How Do We Make
Sense of What We See?
There are different views on how we perceive the
world. These views can be summarized as bottom-
up theories and top-down theories. Bottom-up
theories describe approaches where perception
starts with the stimuli whose appearance you
take in through your eye. You look out onto the
cityscape, and perception happens when the light
information is transported to your brain. Therefore,
they are datadriven (i.e., stimulus-driven) theories.
Not all theorists focus on the sensory data of the
perceptual stimulus. Many theorists prefer top-down
theories, according to which perception is driven by
high-level cognitive processes, existing knowledge,
and the prior expectations that
influence perception (Clark, 2003). These theories
then work their way down to considering the sensory
data, such as the perceptual stimulus. You perceive
buildings as big in the background of the city scene
because you know these buildings are far
away and therefore must be bigger than they
appear.
• From this viewpoint, expectations are
important. When people expect to see
something, they may see it even if it is not
there or is no longer there. For example,
suppose people expect to see a certain person
in a certain location. They may think they see
that person, even if they are actually seeing
someone else who looks only vaguely similar.
• Our understanding of depth perception in infancy
began with the first study conducted in the late
1950s by Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk. They
used an apparatus called the visual cliff. The visual
cliff is a glass table with a board bisecting it. Under
half of the table a checkered cloth is right against the
surface. Under the other half of the table, the cloth
is on the floor. When lit properly, the glass surface
cannot be seen; thus, from the center board, there
appears to be a shallow side and a deep side.
• Gibson and Walk placed infants between the
ages of 6 and 14 months on the center board
and looked at whether they would crawl over
the shallow and deep sides. Avoiding the deep
side was taken as a sign of depth perception.
Of the 36 infants tested(from 6and a half to 14
months old), 27 crawled over the shallow side.
Of the 27, 24 did not crawl over the deep
side..
(A visual cliff involves an apparent, but not
actual drop from one surface to another,
originally created to test babies' depth
perception. It's created by connecting a
transparent glass surface to an opaque
patterned surface. The floor below has the same
pattern as the opaque surface. This apparatus
creates the visual illusion of a cliff while
protecting the subject from injury. )
Gibson and Walk were interested in whether or
not an infant's ability to perceive depth is a
learned behavior or if it was, as they suspected,
innate.
The experiment shows that the depth
perception is partially innate meaning we are
born with it but the majority of its development
happens with experience.
• Later research, however, has demonstrated that children as
young as 3 months are able to perceive the visual cliff. When
placed over the apparent "edge," their heart rates quicken,
eyes widen, and breathing rates increase.  So if these infants
can perceive the visual cliff, why would they be willing to
crawl off what appears to be a straight drop down?
The issue is that children of this age do not yet fully realize
that the consequence of going over this visual cliff is
potentially falling. This realization only comes later when the
child begins to crawl and gains real experience with taking
tumbles.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WvtEFJ
Gp-8

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=SKIaSDZKWOE