Article Review

Brandy Ament Post University Article Review Parents have always compared their children weather it be how fast they started walking to which one gets better grades then the other. I personal am one of these parents and I should know better than to compare my children to one another. Each child is different then the other no matter if they are siblings or not. Just because one child does something before another child does, does not make them less intelligent then the other child. In the article is states that “researchers have found that even children that walk later than others are just as well-coordinated and intelligent as those who were up on their feet early” (Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, 2013). Research shows that children start walking between 8.5 months to 20 months and the average is 12 months. The only time parents should start to worry about if there is something wrong with their child is if they are older then 20 months an still not walking. In this case they should be getting further medical advice and finding out what is going on with their child. In the article “Visual Cliff” is about how they did a experiment called visual cliff at the Cornell University. The experiment is where they took 36 infants from ages 6 months to 14 months and put them on a simulator that was set up making it look like they was on a cliff, but also protected them from being harmed. It was made up of a board, an a heavy piece of glass about a foot off the floor. The board was covered with a patterned material and laid on top of the heavy glass. This was suppose to be as if the infants think they were going to fall because they could see the floor and didn’t know any better. They found that the infants had a good sense not to crawl on the glass of fear of falling, even with their parents calling for them on the other side. The article even says that they did not only use this experiment on infants they used it on chicks, turtles, rats, lambs, pigs, kittens and dogs. All of the animals that it was tried on showed different reactions. The article goes on to talk about what the different reactions the animals had. The one that I found the most interesting was the aquatic turtles. It showed that the aquatic turtle have a poor depth discrimination than land turtle, 76% of them crawled off the board on the shallow side. You think that is strange or odd due to the fact aquatic turtles may have seen their reflections from the glass and think it would be water an prefer to go in on that side but that is wrong. Another conclusion that this may give is that the turtles natural habitat gives it less occasion to “fear” a fall. I found this article very interesting due to the fact it shows that infants have the ability to sense there is something wrong with certain situations at least that is what I got from the article. Reference Schweizenrischer Nationalfods Zur Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung. (2013, March 28). Child development: Early walker or late walker of little consequence. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 4, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases.2013/03/130328075702.htm Gibson, E. J., & Walk, R.D. (1960). The "visual cliff" . Scientific American, 202, 67-71.