ABSTRACT
The extent to which our ability to perceive the world depends upon visual experiences at an early age has been a controversial issue for centuries. It is an offshoot of the old philosophical debate over how our minds obtained knowledge and ideas. On the one hand, there were the nativists who held that man was born with some knowledge of the world. On the other, there were the empiricists who claimed that all knowledge was derived from sensory experience; to them the infant mind was, as Walls (1951) put it, “a tabula rasa, a blank plate of wax upon which the moving finger of experience wrote the entire eventual content of consciousness and memory.” Since much knowledge is acquired through our senses, the question naturally arose as to whether our ability to perceive the world was innate or acquired through experience (for reviews of this debate see Boring, 1942; Walls, 1951; Hochberg, 1962; McCleary, 1970).
