The Growlery

"Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the Growlery.
When I am out of humour, I come and growl here."

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter VIII

Friday, June 19, 2009

What I did on my summer vacation

I've gone far too long without boring you all with my master's thesis topic. I'm spending this summer writing my thesis on the visual cliff experiment, a famous psychology study. However, I'm feeling too burnt out on the subject to write a good summary just now. I would direct you to Wikipedia's summary of the experiment, or its profile of Eleanor Gibson, but unfortunately they are both a tad inaccurate and incomplete and I haven't yet gotten around to editing them. Instead why don't you watch this footage of babies on the visual cliff.


Sadly, it's only two minutes long and so doesn't show rats and chickens and goats being tested on the visual cliff like the complete version does, but at least you can get an idea what the apparatus looks like. If you really want to know how more about Eleanor Gibson or the visual cliff here's a fairly informative obituary and an online reprint of the original 1960 Scientific American article which first publicized the results of the study. Oh, and you can also look at some funny pictures of pigs and babies and goats on the cliff which were taken for an article in Life Magazine (click on any of the 'Related Images' to see the other pictures).

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1 Comments:

Blogger Krista said...

Babies? Babies in labs? Babies!!!

I don't know how they forgot to put babies on this list:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1175

9:08 PM  

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