Department for Developmental Psychology, Institute for Psychology, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jan 30;5:57. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00057. eCollection 2014.
When participants are given the opportunity to simultaneously feel an object and see it through a magnifying or reducing lens, adults estimate object size to be in-between visual and haptic size. Studies with young children, however, seem to demonstrate that their estimates are dominated by a single sense. In the present study, we examined whether this age difference observed in previous studies, can be accounted for by the large discrepancy between felt and seen size in the stimuli used in those studies. In addition, we studied the processes involved in combining the visual and haptic inputs. Adults and 6-year-old children judged objects that were presented to vision, haptics or simultaneously to both senses. The seen object length was reduced or magnified by different lenses. In the condition inducing large intersensory discrepancies, children's judgments in visuo-haptic conditions were almost dominated by vision, whereas adults weighted vision just by ~40%. Neither the adults' nor the children's discrimination thresholds were predicted by models of visuo-haptic integration. With smaller discrepancies, the children's visual weight approximated that of the adults and both the children's and adults' discrimination thresholds were well predicted by an integration model, which assumes that both visual and haptic inputs contribute to each single judgment. We conclude that children integrate seemingly corresponding multisensory information in similar ways as adults do, but focus on a single sense, when information from different senses is strongly discrepant.
当参与者有机会同时感受一个物体并通过放大镜或缩小镜观察它时，成年人会估计物体的大小介于视觉和触觉大小之间。然而，对幼儿的研究似乎表明，他们的估计受到单一感觉的支配。在本研究中，我们研究了这种在以前的研究中观察到的年龄差异是否可以归因于这些研究中使用的刺激中感觉到的和看到的大小之间的巨大差异。此外，我们还研究了视觉和触觉输入相结合的过程。成年人和 6 岁的儿童对视觉、触觉或同时呈现给两种感觉的物体进行判断。可见物体的长度通过不同的透镜缩小或放大。在引起较大感觉差异的条件下，儿童在视触条件下的判断几乎完全受视觉支配，而成年人的权重仅为约 40%。无论是成年人还是儿童的辨别阈值都不能用视触整合模型来预测。在差异较小的情况下，儿童的视觉权重与成年人的视觉权重相近，且儿童和成年人的辨别阈值都可以通过假设视觉和触觉输入都能对每个单独的判断产生影响的整合模型来很好地预测。我们的结论是，当来自不同感觉的信息存在强烈差异时，儿童会以与成年人相似的方式整合看似对应的多感觉信息，但会专注于单一感觉。
