Visual Cliff Experiment

Gibson and walk (1960) investigated depth perception in human infants. The used a piece of equipment called “The visual cliff”. The visual cliff was used to give the impression of depth. Gibson tested 36 babies between the ages of 6 months – 14 months. They placed them individually on one side of the apparatus and got their mothers to encourage them to cross the apparent cliff edge. This was done to see if the infants had an innate awareness of depth. The found that babies would happily crawl across the shallow surface but would not cross over the cliff edge. They concluded from this that babies had an innate knowledge of depth.
However, the researchers had to use babies that were able to crawl which mean the babies were between 6 – 14 months other people argued that by these ages they could of already experienced
There are several problems with such research. Such as, it is difficult to hold the attention of infants. They sometimes lose interest or even fall asleep during the research. This weakens Gibson’s research as not the full attention could have been received by the infant being tested on. There are also many ethical concerns when using infants in a study.
Bowe (1966) also used infants to test size constancy. He conditioned 9 infants aged between 6 – 9 weeks. To respond to the movement of a 30cm cube placed 1m away. Each time the baby turned its head towards the cube it was rewarded. Once Bower was sure it had associated the cube with rewards he then introduced 3 different cubes (30cm – 3m away, 90cm – 3m away and a 90cm – 1m away). He then tested the different responds to each cube and concluded from this study that babies have innate size constancy.
IT is difficult to draw conclusions from infant studies as babies cannot speak or understand instructions properly. It is then hard for people to replicate the findings as they could be false. This therefore weakens both Gibson and bowers study as they used