「子どもの世界 World of the child」

抄録

Prof. Bower proposed that the newborn baby responds to formal, abstract properties of stimulation being independent of any specific sense. A simple example of such a property was provided by inputs that specify the radial direction of a source of stimulation. Considering a sound source: if it comes from straight ahead, a sound source produces exactly the same stimulation in each ear ; if it hits the right ear, the right ear would be stimulated earlier and more intensely than the left ear. At a formal level the same system would operate for detection of an olfactory source, a vibratory source and a visual source.
Prof. Bower explained a machine named sonic guide which, at a formal level, could present the same information as vision through the auditory sense. Using a sonic guide, even a newborn could learn to avoid an approaching object in the dark. In an experiment on reaching of newborns, they performed well in the dark with the sonic guide, even better than with vision in the light. Moreover, if congenitally blind babies were provided with the sonic guide at an early stage, they would grow like sighted children, showing none of the lesions characterizing blind babies.
Formal, abstract and higher-order variables whose sensory content is novel to us as a species, can be utilized easily and thus have the support of a normal program of development.
Concerning the imitation of the newborn, Prof. Bower argued that the newborn might not see the face but the movements of the face. Movement is considered an intermodal and has a higher-order variable. The baby is able to see the movements of the model's face and feel the movements of his own face. In order to test such statement, the moving pattern of dots attached to the face of a lady is presented to the newborns. A three-day-old infant can imitate pure movements, mouth opening and closing and so on.
It has even been reported that 12 month olds are able to identify the gender of other infants from slides. Prof. Bower showed they can easily identify such gender from the pure movement of lights attached to the joints of a baby, one at each shoulder, elbow, wrist, knee and ankle joint.
Finally, from these evidences, Prof. Bower proposed that the newborn's perceptual world is form without content, being simply a structure of places and events, without the rich sensory bloom characterizing our own adults' perceptual world. Following the above, he demonstrated, based on a classic experiment on intermodal perception, the possibility for us to perceive the same world as the newborns do.