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An interesting phenomenon discussed a bit ago in my Cognitive Development course was the importance of self-based locomotion in spatial knowledge and awareness. For that course, I’ve actually just received the go-ahead from the professor, Dr. Bob Siegler, to write my final paper on this specific area of children’s development.

A great experiment that illuminates the importance of self-based locomotion is the famous Visual Cliff experiment:

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Children are placed on a surface like the one seen here, with glass over a reasonably large drop off and were beckoned by their mothers to come across. The experiment is characterized by some sources as a method of showing that depth perception is partly an innate quality (the same article I got the picture from, for example), as children are hesitant to cross the cliff and show signs of fear such as increased heart rate. However, further research has shown that younger children (who haven’t been crawling long, or don’t crawl at all), actually don’t show any signs of fear when beckoned across the cliff. What’s interesting is that after children have been able to crawl for awhile, maybe 2 weeks or so, they won’t go across the cliff and show signs of fear.

Rather than being something unlocked with age, or some entirely innate aspect of development, it’s actually the experience of self-based locomotion that unlocks childrens’ spatial knowledge enough to fear the visual cliff. Although this may make sense with the title of the blog post and some of my previous discussion, after being presented with the visual cliff experiment results, it took our class quite awhile to piece together what factor led to childrens’ recognition of the visual cliff as a (seemingly) dangerous environment and show signs of fear when beckoned across.

A wonderful experiment that teases apart the importance of self-based locomotion to the spatial awareness required to fear the cliff gave non-crawling children special walkers that allowed them to move about under their own power even though they weren’t yet able to crawl. After about 40 hours of using the walkers, these non-crawling children showed the hesitation and fear associated with perception of the cliff as a dangerous environment. Non-crawling children of the same age without the walker experience showed no signs of fear when beckoned across the cliff.

My paper will go beyond a cursory look at self-based locomotion and explore why it is that moving under their own power allows children to develop spatial knowledge, and is a topic that I’m pretty interested in researching. It’ll probably be in the next few days that I start up the research for the paper, and hopefully there will be some interesting papers with results worth sharing here.

1. Encarta Article on Visual Cliff (& picture source) [↩]