Fear of Heights in Infants?

Based largely on the famous “visual cliff” paradigm, conventional wisdom is that crawling infants avoid crossing the brink of a dangerous drop-off because they are afraid of heights. However, recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Avoidance and fear are conflated, and there is no compelling evidence to support fear of heights in human infants. Infants avoid crawling or walking over an impossibly high drop-off because they perceive affordances for locomotion—the relations between their own bodies and skills and the relevant properties of the environment that make an action such as descent possible or impossible.

[1]  J. Clarke,et al.  The etiology of fear of heights and its relationship to severity and individual response patterns. , 1993, Behaviour research and therapy.

[2]  David I. Anderson,et al.  Avoidance of Heights on the Visual Cliff in Newly Walking Infants. , 2005, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[3]  M. Zuckerman.  Sensation seeking and sports , 1983 .

[4]  G. Stricker,et al.  Handbook of Developmental Psychology , 1982 .

[5]  Karen E. Adolph,et al.  Using social information to guide action: Infants' locomotion over slippery slopes , 2010, Neural Networks.

[6]  David I. Anderson,et al.  Travel Broadens the Mind. , 2000, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[7]  J. Campos,et al.  Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. , 1985 .

[8]  R. Graaf,et al.  Specific fears and phobias in the general population: Results from the Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study (NEMESIS) , 2008, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

[9]  R. Mccall,et al.  The Genetic and Environmental Origins of Learning Abilities and Disabilities in the Early School , 2007, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[10]  L. Camras,et al.  Emotional Development: Action, Communication, and Understanding , 2007 .

[11]  Sarah E. Berger,et al.  Developmental continuity? Crawling, cruising, and walking. , 2011, Developmental science.

[12]  R. D. Walk,et al.  The development of depth perception in animals and human infants. , 1966, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[13]  The Organization of Wariness of Heights in Experienced Crawlers. , 2012, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[14]  Kari S. Kretch,et al.  No bridge too high: infants decide whether to cross based on the probability of falling not the severity of the potential fall. , 2013, Developmental science.

[15]  J. Salassa,et al.  Love and Fear of Heights: The Pathophysiology and Psychology of Height Imbalance , 2009, Wilderness & environmental medicine.

[16]  P. Quinn,et al.  Developmental psychology : revisiting the classic studies , 2012 .

[17]  E J Gibson,et al.  Detection of the traversability of surfaces by crawling and walking infants. , 1987, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[18]  B. Bertenthal,et al.  Self-produced Locomotion , 1984 .

[19]  E. Gibson,et al.  A comparative and analytical study of visual depth perception. , 1961 .

[20]  I. Sigel,et al.  HANDBOOK OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY , 2006 .

[21]  S. Rachman.  The conditioning theory of fear-acquisition: a critical examination. , 1977, Behaviour research and therapy.

[22]  Douglas S. Ramsay,et al.  The Emergence of Fear on the Visual Cliff , 1978 .

[23]  K. Adolph,et al.  Learning in the development of infant locomotion. , 1997, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[24]  J. Gibson.  The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , 1979 .

[25]  Thomas Brandt,et al.  Down on heights? One in three has visual height intolerance , 2012, Journal of Neurology.

[26]  R. Held,et al.  MOVEMENT-PRODUCED STIMULATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUALLY GUIDED BEHAVIOR. , 1963, Journal of comparative and physiological psychology.

[27]  Edward S. Reed,et al.  An Odyssey in Learning and Perception. , 1992 .

[28]  Vanessa Lobue.  What Are We So Afraid of? How Early Attention Shapes Our Most Common Fears , 2013 .

[29]  W. Collins,et al.  The concept of development: The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology , 2013 .

[30]  E. Waters,et al.  Infants' reactions to an approaching stranger: description, validation, and functional significance of wariness. , 1975, Child development.

[31]  Anthony M. Avolio,et al.  Walking infants adapt locomotion to changing body dimensions. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[32]  Karen E Adolph,et al.  Locomotor experience and use of social information are posture specific. , 2008, Developmental psychology.

[33]  J. Langley,et al.  Evidence for a non-associative model of the acquisition of a fear of heights. , 1998, Behaviour research and therapy.

[34]  L. Sroufe.  Wariness of Strangers and the Study of Infant Development. , 1977 .

[35]  Karen E Adolph,et al.  When infants take mothers' advice: 18-month-olds integrate perceptual and social information to guide motor action. , 2008, Developmental psychology.

[36]  David A. Sylvester,et al.  The epidemiology of common fears and phobia. , 1969, Comprehensive psychiatry.

[37]  Karen E. Adolph,et al.  The road to walking: What learning to walk tells us about development , 2013 .

[38]  E. Gibson,et al.  Going Somewhere: An Ecological and Experimental Approach to Development of Mobility , 1989 .

[39]  S. Mineka,et al.  A contemporary learning theory perspective on the etiology of anxiety disorders: it's not what you thought it was. , 2006, The American psychologist.

[40]  E. Gibson,et al.  The "visual cliff". , 1960, Scientific American.

[41]  Bennett I. Bertenthal,et al.  Early Experience and Emotional Development: The Emergence of Wariness of Heights , 1992 .

[42]  Kari S. Kretch,et al.  Infants on the edge: Beyond the visual cliff , 2012 .

[43]  K. Adolph.  Specificity of Learning: Why Infants Fall Over a Veritable Cliff , 2000, Psychological science.

[44]  Kari S. Kretch,et al.  Cliff or step? Posture-specific learning at the edge of a drop-off. , 2013, Child development.