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A Reexamination of Fear and Its Determinants on the Visual Cliff
Author(s) -
Bertenthal Bennett I.,
Campos Joseph J.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1984.tb00218.x
Subject(s) - psychology , crawling , psychophysiology , cognitive psychology , conceptualization , set (abstract data type) , cognitive science , social psychology , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , medicine , computer science , anatomy , programming language
Richards and Rader (1983) argue in their recent Psychophysiology paper that crawling experience plays no significant role in the development of visual cliff performance, and also that “fear” is not related to the development of the avoidance of heights. It is our contention that these conclusions rest upon oversimplified assumptions about the nature of fear and its determinants on the visual cliff. A very different set of inferences emerge from an alternative conceptualization of the problem. In contrast to Richards and Rader, we argue that heart rate cannot be simply equated with fear but rather represents one of many loosely correlated indices. Evidence is presented to show that behavioral and cardiac responses converge to demonstrate fear of heights by locomotor infants. It is further argued that the role of crawling experience is not given an adequate test by Richards and Rader. The theoretically important test involves a comparison between locomotor and prelocomotor infants. Data from such comparisons are reviewed and found to support self‐produced locomotion as an important predictor of visual cliff performance.