Infants on the edge: Beyond the visual cliff

Abstract

Eleanor Gibson told her students several stories about the origins of the visual cliff paradigm (also described in Gibson, 1991, 2002). In one rendition, Gibson first began thinking about infants at the edge of a cliff during a family road trip to the Grand Canyon in the mid-1940s. She worried about her two young children playing near the rim, although her husband, perception psychologist James Gibson, assured her that they were sensitive to the visual information for depth. (Later, JJG told the story to students, somewhat gloating that his wife’s research had proven him correct.) In a second rendition, Gibson learned that some species of animals avoid a drop-off shortly after birth. While preparing newborn goats for experimental and control groups at the Cornell Behavior Farm circa 1950, she panicked about where to put the first, carefully washed twin goat while birthing the second one. The farm manager told her to put it on the top of a high camera stand. Gibson worried that it would fall off, but the newborn kid stood upright on the tiny pedestal until she finished birthing and washing the second twin. A third story took place in the mid-1950s. After the grueling process of dark-rearing rats for studies on visual form discrimination with collaborator Richard Walk, Gibson hoped to maximize their efforts by running the animals in a second study. Remembering the Grand Canyon anecdote, Walk suggested depth discrimination, but how to test it? Lashley and Russell’s (1934) famous experiments with dark-reared rats on a jumping stand required days of training in the light. To avoid the training period, Gibson and Walk decided to observe their rats at the edge of a cliff immediately upon emerging into the light. The experiment required a new apparatus they dubbed the “visual cliff”—“cliff” because there was a simulated drop-off and “visual” because they attempted to eliminate all other information for the drop-off (Gibson, 1970). Regardless of the source of inspiration for the paradigm, in the 1950s, rearing animals under altered environmental conditions was a popular method for assessing the role of experience in development. The visual cliff, conceived by Gibson and Walk as a test of visual depth perception in dark-reared rats, seemed an appropriate way of addressing the age-old question of whether perception of space requires visual experience. Their first publication (1957, Science) reported findings from the dark-reared rats, and on its heels came the 1960 Scientific American article with the famous photographs of infants and kittens on a checkerboard surface peering over the edge of a precipice. Their most scholarly work, the 1961 monograph, described all of their comparative studies.

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