Risky visuomotor choices during rapid reaching in childhood

Dekker, T.M.; Nardini, M.

doi:10.1111/desc.12322

Risky visuomotor choices during rapid reaching in childhood

Dekker, T.M.; Nardini, M.

Authors

T.M. Dekker

Professor Marko Nardini marko.nardini@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

Many everyday actions are implicit gambles because imprecisions in our visuomotor systems place probabilities on our success or failure. Choosing optimal action strategies involves weighting the costs and gains of potential outcomes by their corresponding probabilities, and requires stable representations of one's own imprecisions. How this ability is acquired during development in childhood when visuomotor skills change drastically is unknown. In a rewarded rapid reaching task, 6- to 11-year-old children followed ‘risk-seeking’ strategies leading to overly high point-loss. Adults' performance, in contrast, was close to optimal. Children's errors were not explained by distorted estimates of value or probability, but may reflect different action selection criteria or immature integration of value and probability information while planning movements. These findings provide a starting point for understanding children's risk-taking in everyday visuomotor situations when suboptimal choices can be dangerous. Moreover, children's risky visuomotor decisions mirror those reported for non-motor gambles, raising the possibility that common processes underlie development across decision-making domains.

Citation

Dekker, T., & Nardini, M. (2016). Risky visuomotor choices during rapid reaching in childhood. Developmental Science, 19(3), 427-439. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12322

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 2, 2015
Online Publication Date	Jul 17, 2015
Publication Date	May 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Apr 21, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Jul 17, 2016
Journal	Developmental Science
Print ISSN	1363-755X
Electronic ISSN	1467-7687
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	19
Issue	3
Pages	427-439
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12322

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Copyright Statement
© 2015 The Authors. Developmental Science Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.