Explain how infants learn to use visual cues to depth perception and other visual and proprioceptive (bodily position) cues to avoid unsafe drop-offs as they crawl and walk in the first two years.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The ideal answer should include:
1. Infants can perceive cues to depth accurately using stereopsis by 4 months of age.
2. Infants do not at first avoid obvious drop-offs and will crawl right over an edge or down an overly steep ramp.
3. Infants appear to learn environmental affordances for what is safe and unsafe by exploring, and show little evidence of fear of heights.
4. These affordances include visual evidence of a drop-off, sensorimotor evidence that one is falling or stretching an arm or leg over an edge, and bodily position cues.
5. After a few weeks of crawling, infants are very accurate at judging the risk of falling over an edge or down an overly steep ramp.
6. Infants do not immediately apply what they have learned about affordances for safe crawling to walking and will walk right off an edge after having previously avoided it when crawling.
7. After several weeks of walking, infants learn the affordances for unsafe walking.
8. The reason crawling and walking involve separate learning is that the whole system of relationships between movement and perceptual cues has to be reorganized in order to walk safely because walking provides different perceptual affordances than crawling.