How can sensory experience maintain and elaborate inborn perceptual abilities?

Sensory experience plays a critical role in maintaining and elaborating inborn perceptual abilities, acting as a necessary supplement to innate functions rather than their sole creator. While research indicates that infants possess stable, built-in perceptual capabilities—such as depth perception and the ability to make visual discriminations—these functions require ongoing environmental interaction to remain effective.12

Sensory experience supports these abilities through several key processes:

• Maintenance: Evidence suggests that innate perceptual functions may deteriorate through disuse. Continuous sensory input is required to preserve these basic abilities, preventing the decline of neural mechanisms that are otherwise present at birth.2
• Elaboration: Through interaction with the environment, the perceptual system progresses from primitive functions to complex operations, such as sophisticated form identification and discrimination. This process involves learning to respond to new aspects of sensory stimuli or interpreting existing stimuli through refined associations.21
• Neural Tuning: Experience facilitates structural changes in the brain, including the sharpening of neuronal tuning functions and the reorganization of neural representations. These physiological adaptations allow the system to increase the statistical reliability of its responses, effectively elaborating on the brain's initial, unlearned capacity for perception.3