Human Growth and Development / Unit 18 HGD 2580 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Perception: Built In or Built Up?
The idea
The perceptual arc returns to nature and nurture. Some capacities are present at birth: newborns hear and prefer their native language, entry 0343, and touch is well developed, entry 0345. Others are built by experience and timing. The visual cortex develops in a burst at two to four months, a sensitive period, entry 0321. The visual cliff, entry 0341, once read as proof of an innate fear of heights, turned out to reflect locomotor experience: infants with more experience moving are more sensitive to depth, and each new way of moving has to be learned. Research on infant cognition makes a parallel point, entry 0352: tasks that do not require reaching reveal abilities earlier than Piaget thought, so what infants seem to lack can depend on how they are tested. At the other end of life, hearing loss is linked to dementia, but a trial of hearing aids found no overall cognitive benefit, entry 2155, so an association is not a cause.
In practice
A newborn who already prefers her mother's language, and the same child a year later learning, crawl by crawl, where the drop-offs are.
Where people slip
The misconception is that perception is either innate or learned. The course's evidence shows both: basic sensory capacities arrive early, and experience, timing and method shape what develops and what researchers can see. Across adulthood, perceptual decline is real but gradual and varied, and its links to cognition are associations that trials are still testing. For the exam, know which senses are most and least developed at birth, the visual cliff and its reinterpretation, the midlife and late-life sensory changes, and the difference between an association and a cause.
Your place on the trail
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