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The cradle of knowledge - Development of perception in infancy. By P.J. Kellman & M.E. Arterberry. London: MIT Press. 1998. Hardback 29.25. ISBN 0-262-11232-9. Some 50 years ago (1947) Austin Riesen wrote that `the study of innate visual organization in man is not open to direct observation during early infancy, since a young baby is too helpless to respond differentially to visual excitation'. For hundreds of years it was felt that the study of infant perception was not possible, and theoreticians had recourse to `thought experiments', in which they imagined what the world might be like to the newborn and young infant. However, it turns out that research into infant perception is possible after all, and infancy researchers have become adept at developing procedures and methodologies to investigate perception in the young infant. Over the last 40 years there has been an enormous amount of research on perceptual development, and this is one of two recent books whose aim is to give an overview of much of the research (see also Slater, 1998).
Kellman and Arterberry are recognised authorities and one would expect that this book would be both thoroughly researched and well integrated, which indeed it is. The authors point out that the function of perception is to provide accurate representations of the world and to guide actions - the interplay between perception and action is at the forefront of current research. Thus, a main theme of the book is that perceptual knowledge and understanding precedes, and guides, motor and action performance in early development. Given that vision alone involves some 40 to 50% of the cerebral cortex, and that there are some one hundred billion neurons in the brain, we can expect that visual development will tell a complex story, which it does. The authors give detailed accounts of space, pattern, object, motion and event perception, and of perception across the senses - intermodal perception.
In their chapter on space perception the authors note that recent evidence of size constancy in the newborn infant `militates a radically revised view...