ABSTRACT
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Martha E. Arterberry Gettysburg College
Clay Mash Eunice Kennedy Shriver, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Perception begins our experience and interpretation of the world, and so is crucial to the growth of thought, to the regulation of emotions, to interaction in social relationships, and indeed to most aspects of our development. The input, translation, and encoding of sensory information in perception are essential to thought and action. Even very young children recognize the fundamental position of perception in life (Pillow, 1989): Three-year-olds will attribute knowledge about an object only to people who have viewed the object, and not to people who have not viewed the object (Gopnik, Slaughter, & Meltzoff, 1994). For all these reasons, philosophers, physicists, physiologists, and psychologists have been strongly motivated to study perception and especially its development.
