| Eleanor Gibson's mid-century visual cliff experiment remains important in modem psychology, most notably featuring in introductory textbooks and thereby contributing to students' initiation into the discipline. But the version of the visual cliff popularly reported often perpetuates myths about the cliff's inspiration or mentions only the infant subjects of the visual cliff, resulting in a simplified origin myth which obscures the historic facts. This thesis contests the major tenets of the visual cliff myth---that it was intentional and that it was a single experiment about babies---by focusing on the aspects of Gibson's life which led her to conduct the experiment, and by highlighting the forgotten animal subjects of the visual cliff. The thesis also addresses how the simplistic myth of the visual cliff arose by analyzing the various publications which played a role in the experiment's popularization. By treating at the visual cliff as a scientific object, an object necessarily embedded in its culture of origin, this thesis offers insight into the historically contingent production of knowledge in psychology. |
