The University of Queensland is playing its part in ongoing worldwide research aimed at finding out how babies and very young children perceive their surroundings and how much knowledge and ability they are born with.
Through a host of medical and behavioural experiments around the globe, researchers are trying to separate the elements of 'nature and nurture' - to discover how much infants know instinctively as opposed to how much is learned from experience.
At the University's School of Psychology, senior lecturer Dr Jack Broerse and research coordinator Sharon Schipke have set up the Infant Perception Laboratory.
Their 'volunteers' are crawling infants, most aged six to eight months, who are brought along by parents keen to assist this research project into early perceptual development.
According to Ms Schipke the research addresses the question of infants' perception of surfaces. Specifically, how the size and texture of surfaces influences simple actions such as crawling from one location to another. The other side of this coin is how infants respond to the absence of a surface.
Some of the classic studies in infant perception suggest that infants avoid 'falling-off places' such as those that occur when no supporting surface is visible. Yet everyday experience tells us that this is not always the case. Infants do fall into swimming pools, and do fall down stairs.
To investigate these apparent contradictions between research and everyday observation, Dr Broerse and Ms Schipke have set up a 'visual cliff', the only one of its kind in Australia, where clear perspex sheets support the infants above the optical illusion of a sudden drop.
As parents reassure, encourage and call to their children, the youngsters reactions to this new environment are videotaped.
Will they crawl over the 'edge' of the cliff? Will they cross on 'bridges' of different widths? What effect does it have if a bib prevents their seeing where they are putting their hands?
Results show that infants do indeed behave as if they have the ability to perceive adult-like qualities like size and depth, thus confirming earlier experimental observations - but only partially. When infants can't see the relationship between their hands and a surface directly, all discretion vanishes, falling-off place or not.
Dr Broerse believes that it is the opportunities to see and explore the relationship between hands and surface texture that underlies many swimming pool incidents involving young newly-locomoting toddlers. When they try to explore the surface properties of water with their hands, the absence of support is likely to result in over-balancing.
'The problem might be resolved if you could somehow destroy the illusion that the pool has a potentially rigid surface that warrants further exploration,' he said.
This is not straightforward, but possibilities might include something as simple as a device that creates ripples to confirm for the infant that the surface is not rigid. Other possibilities include the combination of different colour patterns for the edge of the pool and the area beneath the water. It may also be that toys floating in a pool lull infants into thinking the surface will support them too.
Dr Broerse said traditional theories about perception always ended up in arguments about how much was learned and how much was innate.
'What this work tries to clarify is what is meant by the phrase ?innate knowledge' in perceptual ability,' he said. While there's no escaping the fact that the relationship between human sensory and motor systems are the products of thousands of years of evolution, portraying this ?pre-wiring' as a form of ?knowledge' has not been particularly helpful in the past.'t
Dr Broerse said his work led on to different ways of looking at concepts such as knowledge and intelligence which could have practical application in the design of intelligent machines and computers.
Though Dr Broerse has been conducting similar perception experiments for several years, both he and Ms Schipke said there was a huge area of connected research they would like to tackle if they had more infants to work with and the necessary funding.
For further information, contact Dr Jack Broerse (telephone 3365 6213) or Sharon Schipke (telephone 3365 7296).
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