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When vision is not an option: children's integration of auditory and haptic information is suboptimal

Petrini, K.; Remark, A.; Smith, L.; Nardini, M.

When vision is not an option: children's integration of auditory and haptic information is suboptimal Thumbnail


Authors

K. Petrini

A. Remark

L. Smith



Abstract

When visual information is available, human adults, but not children, have been shown to reduce sensory uncertainty by taking a weighted average of sensory cues. In the absence of reliable visual information (e.g. extremely dark environment, visual disorders), the use of other information is vital. Here we ask how humans combine haptic and auditory information from childhood. In the first experiment, adults and children aged 5 to 11 years judged the relative sizes of two objects in auditory, haptic, and non-conflicting bimodal conditions. In 'Experiment 2', different groups of adults and children were tested in non-conflicting and conflicting bimodal conditions. In 'Experiment 1', adults reduced sensory uncertainty by integrating the cues optimally, while children did not. In 'Experiment 2', adults and children used similar weighting strategies to solve audio–haptic conflict. These results suggest that, in the absence of visual information, optimal integration of cues for discrimination of object size develops late in childhood.

Citation

Petrini, K., Remark, A., Smith, L., & Nardini, M. (2014). When vision is not an option: children's integration of auditory and haptic information is suboptimal. Developmental Science, 17(3), 376-387. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12127

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 19, 2013
Online Publication Date Feb 25, 2014
Publication Date May 1, 2014
Deposit Date Feb 26, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Developmental Science
Print ISSN 1363-755X
Electronic ISSN 1467-7687
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 17
Issue 3
Pages 376-387
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12127

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2014 The Authors. Developmental Science Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.





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