Slater A, Mattock A, Brown E
Department of Psychology, Washington Singer Laboratories, University of Exeter, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 1990 Apr;49(2):314-22. doi: 10.1016/0022-0965(90)90061-c.
Two experiments are described whose aim was to investigate whether perception of size at birth is determined solely by proximal (retinal) stimulation, or whether newborn babies have the ability to perceive an object's real size across changes in distance. In Experiment 1, preferential looking between pairs of stimuli which varied in real size and viewing distance was found to be solely determined by retinal size, suggesting that changes to proximal stimulation can have profound effects on newborns' looking behavior. However, in Experiment 2 newborns were desensitized to changes in distance (and retinal size) during familiarization trials, and subsequently strongly preferred a different sized object to the familiar one, suggesting that the real size had been perceived as constant across the familiarization trials. These results confirm Granrud's (1987) findings that size constancy is present at birth.
本文描述了两项实验，其目的是研究出生时对大小的感知是否仅由近端（视网膜）刺激决定，或者新生儿是否有能力在距离变化时感知物体的实际大小。在实验1中，发现对实际大小和观看距离不同的刺激对之间的优先注视完全由视网膜大小决定，这表明近端刺激的变化会对新生儿的注视行为产生深远影响。然而，在实验2中，新生儿在熟悉试验期间对距离（和视网膜大小）的变化不敏感，随后强烈偏好一个与熟悉物体不同大小的物体，这表明在熟悉试验中实际大小被视为恒定。这些结果证实了格兰鲁德（1987年）的发现，即出生时就存在大小恒常性。
