Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1361-7.
doi: 10.1177/0956797613476047. Epub 2013 May 30.

The epigenesis of wariness of heights

Audun Dahl  1 , Joseph J Campos, David I Anderson, Ichiro Uchiyama, David C Witherington, Mika Ueno, Laure Poutrain-Lejeune, Marianne Barbu-Roth
Affiliations

The epigenesis of wariness of heights

Audun Dahl et al. Psychol Sci. .

Abstract

Human infants with little or no crawling experience surprisingly show no wariness of heights, but such wariness becomes exceptionally strong over the life span. Neither depth perception nor falling experiences explain this extraordinary developmental shift; however, something about locomotor experience does. The crucial component of locomotor experience in this emotional change is developments in visual proprioception-the optically based perception of self-movement. Precrawling infants randomly assigned to drive a powered mobility device showed significantly greater visual proprioception, and significantly greater wariness of heights, than did controls. More important, visual proprioception mediated the relation between wariness of heights and locomotor experience. In a separate study, crawling infants' visual proprioception predicted whether they would descend onto the deep side of a visual cliff, a finding that confirms the importance of visual proprioception in the development of wariness of heights.

Keywords: emotional development; motor processes.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) The powered mobility device (PMD), (B) the moving room, (C) the crossing paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 1), (D) the lowering paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 2).
Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) The powered mobility device (PMD), (B) the moving room, (C) the crossing paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 1), (D) the lowering paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 2).
Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) The powered mobility device (PMD), (B) the moving room, (C) the crossing paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 1), (D) the lowering paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 2).
Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) The powered mobility device (PMD), (B) the moving room, (C) the crossing paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 1), (D) the lowering paradigm on the visual cliff (Study 2).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Examples of infant (solid line) and wall (dashed line) position plotted against time. Figures show data from .75 seconds before to 1.5 seconds after start of wall-movement (time = 0, indicated with a dotted vertical line). Before plotting, infant and wall data were divided by their standard deviations and centered around their position at the time of recorded wall movement. (A) rmax = .89. (B) rmax = .16.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Examples of infant (solid line) and wall (dashed line) position plotted against time. Figures show data from .75 seconds before to 1.5 seconds after start of wall-movement (time = 0, indicated with a dotted vertical line). Before plotting, infant and wall data were divided by their standard deviations and centered around their position at the time of recorded wall movement. (A) rmax = .89. (B) rmax = .16.
Figure 3
Figure 3
(A) Study 1: Estimated crossing behavior on the visual cliff as a function of moving room performance. The figure shows fitted probabilities of an infant crossing on the deep (solid line) and shallow (dashed line) side as a function of rmax. (B) Study 2: Moving room performance mediates the relation between experimental condition and HR differentiation. Numbers represent standardized regression coefficients. * p < .05, ** p < .01.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adolph KE. Learning in the development of infant locomotion. Monographs of the Society for Research on Child Development. 1997;62:1–162. - PubMed
    1. Anderson DI, Campos JJ, Barbu-Roth MA. A developmental perspective on visual proprioception. In: Bremner G, Slater A, editors. Theories of infant development. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell; 2003. pp. 30–69.
    1. Bertenthal BI, Campos JJ. A systems approach to the organizing effects of self-produced locomotion during infancy. In: Rovee-Collier C, Lipsitt L, editors. Advances in infancy research. Vol. 6. Norwood, NJ: Ablex; 1990. pp. 1–60.
    1. Brandt T, Arnold F, Bles W, Kapteyn TS. The mechanism of physiological height vertigo. I. Theoretical approach and psychophysics. Acta Oto-Laryngologica. 1980;89:513–523. - PubMed
    1. Campos JJ. Heart rate: a sensitive tool for the study of emotional development in the infant. In: Lipsitt L, editor. Developmental psychobiology: The significance of infancy. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; 1976. pp. 1–31.

Publication types