School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland; School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Jul;207:105094. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105094. Epub 2021 Mar 11.
Sensitivity to the temporal coherence of visual and tactile signals increases perceptual reliability and is evident during infancy. However, it is not clear how, or whether, bidirectional visuotactile interactions change across childhood. Furthermore, no study has explored whether viewing a body modulates how children perceive visuotactile sequences of events. Here, children aged 5-7 years (n = 19), 8 and 9 years (n = 21), and 10-12 years (n = 24) and adults (n = 20) discriminated the number of target events (one or two) in a task-relevant modality (touch or vision) and ignored distractors (one or two) in the opposing modality. While participants performed the task, an image of either a hand or an object was presented. Children aged 5-7 years and 8 and 9 years showed larger crossmodal interference from visual distractors when discriminating tactile targets than the converse. Across age groups, this was strongest when two visual distractors were presented with one tactile target, implying a "fission-like" crossmodal effect (perceiving one event as two events). There was no influence of visual context (viewing a hand or non-hand image) on visuotactile interactions for any age group. Our results suggest robust interference from discontinuous visual information on tactile discrimination of sequences of events during early and middle childhood. These findings are discussed with respect to age-related changes in sensory dominance, selective attention, and multisensory processing.
视觉和触觉信号的时间连贯性敏感性会提高感知的可靠性，并且在婴儿期就已经很明显。然而，目前尚不清楚双向视触觉相互作用在整个儿童期是如何变化的，或者是否会发生变化。此外，没有研究探讨观看身体是否会改变儿童对视觉触觉事件序列的感知。在这里，年龄在 5-7 岁（n=19）、8 岁和 9 岁（n=21）、10-12 岁（n=24）和成年人（n=20）的儿童在与任务相关的模态（触觉或视觉）中辨别目标事件（一个或两个），并忽略在对立模态中的干扰项（一个或两个）。当参与者执行任务时，会呈现一只手或一个物体的图像。与触觉目标相比，年龄在 5-7 岁和 8 岁和 9 岁的儿童在辨别触觉目标时，来自视觉干扰项的跨模态干扰更大。在所有年龄组中，当呈现两个视觉干扰项和一个触觉目标时，这种情况最为明显，这意味着存在“分裂样”的跨模态效应（将一个事件视为两个事件）。对于任何年龄组，视觉上下文（观看手或非手图像）对视触觉相互作用都没有影响。我们的研究结果表明，在儿童早期和中期，不连续的视觉信息对触觉事件序列的辨别会产生强烈的干扰。这些发现与与年龄相关的感官优势、选择性注意和多感官处理的变化有关。
