PSY 457LEC Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Rhesus Macaque, Depth Perception, Visual Acuity
Document Summary
Goal: to examine the reversibility of infants" perceptual narrowing in other-race face recognition. Subjects: 16, 8- to 10-month old caucasian infants with little to no exposure to asian individuals. Method: training with 8 females over 21-day period (8 min per day), habituation, test. Perceptual narrowing suggests that (visual) learning doesn"t stop the moment visual acuity is adult-like. Perhaps (visual) learning is a lifelong process of continually adapting to your environment. This fine-tuning might be less observable in adults because we"re already pretty well adapted. Might change when moving to a new place. Innate mechanism: the force with which a rat jumps varies with gap length & doesn"t differ btwn rats raised in light / dark. But: jumping requires training & extensive testing in light. Given a choice, animals will avoid crossing a vertical edge to a surface that seems far away. Glass rules out other depth cues (tactile, auditory, air currents, temperature)
