Ratcliffe Natasha, Greenfield Katie, Ropar Danielle, Howard Ellen M, Newport Roger
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2021 Oct 7;15:702519. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.702519. eCollection 2021.
Forming an accurate representation of the body relies on the integration of information from multiple sensory inputs. Both vision and proprioception are important for body localization. Whilst adults have been shown to integrate these sources in an optimal fashion, few studies have investigated how children integrate visual and proprioceptive information when localizing the body. The current study used a mediated reality device called MIRAGE to explore how the brain weighs visual and proprioceptive information in a hand localization task across early childhood. Sixty-four children aged 4-11 years estimated the position of their index finger after viewing congruent or incongruent visuo-proprioceptive information regarding hand position. A developmental trajectory analysis was carried out to explore the effect of age on condition. An age effect was only found in the incongruent condition which resulted in greater mislocalization of the hand toward the visual representation as age increased. Estimates by younger children were closer to the true location of the hand compared to those by older children indicating less weighting of visual information. Regression analyses showed localizations errors in the incongruent seen condition could not be explained by proprioceptive accuracy or by general attention or social differences. This suggests that the way in which visual and proprioceptive information are integrated optimizes throughout development, with the bias toward visual information increasing with age.
形成对身体的准确表征依赖于来自多种感官输入信息的整合。视觉和本体感觉对于身体定位都很重要。虽然已有研究表明成年人能够以最佳方式整合这些信息源，但很少有研究探讨儿童在进行身体定位时是如何整合视觉和本体感觉信息的。本研究使用了一种名为MIRAGE的介导现实设备，以探究在幼儿期的手部定位任务中大脑如何权衡视觉和本体感觉信息。64名4至11岁的儿童在查看了关于手部位置的一致或不一致的视觉-本体感觉信息后，估计其食指的位置。进行了一项发育轨迹分析，以探究年龄对实验条件的影响。仅在不一致条件下发现了年龄效应，即随着年龄增长，手部向视觉表征方向的定位错误更大。与年龄较大的儿童相比，年龄较小的儿童的估计更接近手部的真实位置，这表明视觉信息的权重较小。回归分析表明，在不一致的视觉条件下的定位误差无法通过本体感觉准确性、一般注意力或社会差异来解释。这表明视觉和本体感觉信息的整合方式在整个发育过程中不断优化，对视觉信息的偏向随着年龄增长而增加。
