Department of Psychology, University of Bath, London, UK.
Developmental Neurosciences Programme, University College London, London, UK.
Dev Sci. 2021 Jan;24(1):e13001. doi: 10.1111/desc.13001. Epub 2020 Jun 25.
Integrating different senses to reduce sensory uncertainty and increase perceptual precision can have an important compensatory function for individuals with visual impairment and blindness. However, how visual impairment and blindness impact the development of optimal multisensory integration in the remaining senses is currently unknown. Here we first examined how audio-haptic integration develops and changes across the life span in 92 sighted (blindfolded) individuals between 7 and 70 years of age. We used a child-friendly task in which participants had to discriminate different object sizes by touching them and/or listening to them. We assessed whether audio-haptic performance resulted in a reduction of perceptual uncertainty compared to auditory-only and haptic-only performance as predicted by maximum-likelihood estimation model. We then compared how this ability develops in 28 children and adults with different levels of visual experience, focussing on low-vision individuals and blind individuals that lost their sight at different ages during development. Our results show that in sighted individuals, adult-like audio-haptic integration develops around 13-15 years of age, and remains stable until late adulthood. While early-blind individuals, even at the youngest ages, integrate audio-haptic information in an optimal fashion, late-blind individuals do not. Optimal integration in low-vision individuals follows a similar developmental trajectory as that of sighted individuals. These findings demonstrate that visual experience is not necessary for optimal audio-haptic integration to emerge, but that consistency of sensory information across development is key for the functional outcome of optimal multisensory integration.
整合不同感觉以减少感觉不确定性并提高感知精度，对于视力受损和失明的个体具有重要的补偿功能。然而，视力受损和失明如何影响剩余感觉中最佳多感觉整合的发展目前尚不清楚。在这里，我们首先研究了在 7 至 70 岁的 92 名视力正常（蒙住眼睛）个体中，音频触觉整合如何在整个生命周期中发展和变化。我们使用了一项适合儿童的任务，参与者必须通过触摸和/或聆听来辨别不同的物体大小。我们评估了音频触觉表现是否与听觉表现和触觉表现相比导致感知不确定性降低，正如最大似然估计模型所预测的那样。然后，我们比较了在具有不同视觉经验水平的 28 名儿童和成年人中，这种能力是如何发展的，重点关注在发育过程中不同年龄失明的低视力个体和盲人。我们的结果表明，在视力正常的个体中，成人般的音频触觉整合大约在 13-15 岁之间发展，并一直稳定到老年。虽然早期失明的个体，即使在最小的年龄，也以最佳的方式整合音频触觉信息，但晚期失明的个体则不能。低视力个体的最佳整合遵循与视力正常个体相似的发展轨迹。这些发现表明，视觉经验对于最佳音频触觉整合的出现并非必需，但感官信息在整个发展过程中的一致性对于最佳多感觉整合的功能结果至关重要。
