PSYC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Tabula Rasa, Depth Perception

• School: UConn
• Department: Psychological Sciences
• Course: PSYC 1100
• Professor: Harvey Swadlow

Document Summary

Perceptual abilities are passed down through genetics. If you can do something right after birth without any experiences, it must be from genetics (nature) The problem is most species aren"t developed enough to be tested. Some animals, like chickens, are born well-developed so they are good for infant testing. Put chicks on visual cliffs to see if they step onto the shallower or deeper side-- they always choose the shallower side. This shows that they are born with some depth perception. Humans are born with face and voice perception-- learn parents very quickly. Infants are more attentive to faces and voices than other. Deprivation experiments (testing people that haven"t experienced certain things things) If the person can do the task without experience, it must be innate. Cataract patients who can"t see could tell figure from ground but couldn"t detect patterns. Born a tabula rasa or blank sheet. There is a critical period for developing binocular vision.