How walking influences the development of absolute distance perception

Abstract

The emergence of upright locomotion in infants has been shown to influence and dramatically reorganize a myriad of behaviors. The change, however, does not always lead to improvements, but can also cause temporal instability and lost of integrity in many seemingly unrelated systems. Our empirical study showed that the onset of walking is also related to a disruption in infants' perceived reachability. This paper investigates the reorganization of the processes responsible for integration of different visual depth cues at the onset of walking and how such recalibration influences reaching behavior. A reward-mediated learning is employed to mimic the development of absolute distance perception in infants over a short developmental timescale. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.