Interaction of visual and tactile information in the control of chicks' locomotion in the visual cliff

The behaviour of two-day-old chicks placed on the deep side of a visual cliff was examined. With increasing depth of the floor below the chicks, latency to move over the deep side towards another chick on the shallow side increased, while speed of locomotion decreased. Chicks given the same incentive to step over a visible edge onto the deep side showed a stronger inhibition of movement at all depths, indicating that absolute depth of a surface and relative depth of an edge affect behaviour differently. At depths greater than 4 cm, the majority of chicks performed a jump from the deep to the shallow side, and the distances over which they jumped corresponded to those jumped when tested with a real gap. These results suggest that detection of the far side of a gap alone is sufficient to elicit a jump. Just before jumping, chicks adopted a head orientation which depended on the vertical distance of the cliff edge below them. Changes in head orientation did not maintain retinal fixation of the edge, and may instead be important in setting the correct direction of thrust when jumping.