Figure 3.1 The visual illusion of the Ames window
Because the left-hand corner of the room shown in (a) is almost twice as far away from the viewer as the right-hand corner, the girl standing in the left-hand corner projects a smaller retinal image than the boy in the right even though they are both the same height in reality.
When viewing the room through a peephole (b), we assume that we are looking at a normal room and that both children are at the same distance: hence the illusion of the impossibly different relative sizes of the children.
Source: adapted from Slee, 2002
From the perspective of psychologists such as Ames, perception is seen to occur as a result of the relationship between the observing person and the observed object. Context is the critical functional factor in helping us interpret the world around us. Ames and other functionalists argued against the idea that we can ever know anything as it 'really is'. We can know things only in their relationship to us.
The work of Eleanor J. Gibson also provides a number of key concepts that will broaden our understanding of cognitive development. Gibson is well known for a range of elegant experimental studies examining
perception. For example, most undergraduate psychology students will be familiar with the 'visual cliff' studies conducted by Gibson and Walk (1960). This experiment basically tested whether depth perception is an innate ability or whether it is learned. Another of the classical experiments conducted by Gibson and her partner James Gibson (Gibson and Gibson, 1955) provided a foundation for the introduction of a different way to understand learning. The study involved the opportunity to compare and contrast a series of graphic 'scribbles' against a standard 'scribble'. By simply having the opportunity to make such comparisons, viewers became aware of variations in the nature of the scribbles, their performance improving with the number of trials allowed. Unlike the associationism described in Chapter 6, whereby learning is seen to involve the forming of associations, the Gibsons' experimental studies suggested that the simple opportunity to improve perception (by examining the scribbles) allowed learning to occur. Furthermore, the learning occurred in the absence of any reinforcement (Pick, 1992). A key concept in the Gibsons' research is that of 'differentiation': 'Our perception improves because we come to detect or differentiate more of the aspects, features, and nuances of the tremendously complex stimulation that impinges upon us' (Pick, 1992: 788).
Another key element associated with the research of James Gibson is that of'affordances'. Gibson (1979) used this term to apply to the particu- lar perceptual arrangements an organism possesses in order to perceive properties of the environment in a certain way. The idea is that the proper- ties of any sensed object are perceived in a way to optimize the species' survival. Thus, how objects are perceived depends on their meaning to the organism (Johansson et al., 1980). Box 3.1 addresses the child's search for meaning in stories.
Another prominent thinker influencing later versions of organicism was the biologist von Bertalanffy. Psychology in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by a positivistic-mechanistic-reductiomstic approach, which can be epitomized as the 'robot model of man' (von Bertalanffy, 1968: 5-6). Von Bertalanffy was particularly interested in the application of systems theory to biological processes. He defined a system as a 'complex of interacting elements' (1968: 55). He was particularly interested in the relationship between the parts and the whole. An important contribution that he made to systems theory was to identify 'open' and 'closed' systems.
A closed system was denned as one in which there is no interaction with the surrounding environment (such as a chemical reaction in a closed container). An open system (such as a family) is one that interacts with the surrounding environment. As Minuchin (1985) noted, systems theory is a twentieth-century scientific paradigm that has been used in conjunction with physical, biological and social systems. (Systems thinking will be further described in Chapters 4 and 11.)
Box 3.1 The child's search for meaning in stories
The idea that perception involves 'meaning-making' was an impor- tant element of Eleanor Gibson's thinking and research. This idea is well demonstrated in the process by which children learn to read.
Various theories have been proposed to account for children's lan- guage acquisition. One challenge faced by the various theories is their ability to explain the very rapid growth in word learning such that, by six years of age, an English-speaking child will have a vocabulary of approximately 6000 words (Anglin, 1993). It appears that direct teaching cannot easily account for such a rapid rate of word acquisi- tion, so attention has been given to the means by which children learn words incidentally from their environment. Reading storybooks to children has been researched to understand whether children learn from this. Reviews of research (e.g. Bus et at., 1995) suggest there is a positive correlation between storybook reading and vocabulary devel- opment. It has also been established that the style of storybook read- ing is associated with a child's word acquisition such that a more interactive adult storybook reading style using open-ended questions and praise can positively influence language development. Research by Senechal (1997) indicates that pre-school children make more gains in vocabulary after repeated readings of a storybook than after a single reading. Repeated exposure to the storyline and pictures appeared to facilitate their memory search for novel labels. Senechal (1997) also found that asking labelling questions during repeated readings of a book was a very powerful means for encouraging the acquisition of expressive language.
Having outlined a number of influences shaping an organicist approach to the study of human development, we now turn to a number of prom- inent early theories that highlighted the 'stage-like' aspect of development, beginning with the work of Stanley Hall.