Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
School of Psychology and Sport Science, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 Nov;223:105477. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105477. Epub 2022 Jun 24.
During development our body undergoes significant changes, yet we are able to maintain a coherent experience of our body and sense of self. Bodily experience is thought to comprise integration of multisensory signals (vision, touch, and proprioception) constrained by top-down knowledge of body appearance. Evidence from developmental studies suggests that low-level multisensory integration develops throughout childhood, reaching adult levels by 10 years of age. However, how high-level cognitive knowledge changes during childhood to constrain our multisensory body experience is unknown. This study describes four experiments examining high-level contributions to the bodily experience in children compared with adults using the rubber hand illusion and a monkey hand illusion. We found that children (5-17 years of age) exhibited more flexible body representations, showing stronger illusions for small and fantastical (monkey) fake hands compared with adults. Conversely, using a task indirectly capturing changes in hand size, we found that children and adults demonstrated statistically equivalent increases and decreases in hand size following illusions over large and small hands, respectively. Interestingly, at baseline children showed a bias in reporting larger hand size judgments that decreased with age. Finally, we did not find a relationship between individual differences in fantasy proneness and illusion strength for a fantastical (monkey) hand for children or adults, suggesting that developmental changes of top-down constraints are not purely driven by more diffuse boundaries between imagination and reality. These data suggest that high-level constraints acting on our multisensory body experience change during development, allowing children a more flexible bodily experience compared with adults.
在发育过程中，我们的身体会发生重大变化，但我们能够保持对身体和自我意识的连贯体验。身体体验被认为包括多感觉信号（视觉、触觉和本体感觉）的整合，这些整合受到对身体外观的自上而下的知识的限制。来自发展研究的证据表明，低水平的多感觉整合在整个儿童期发展，到 10 岁时达到成人水平。然而，在儿童期，高级认知知识如何变化以限制我们的多感觉身体体验尚不清楚。本研究使用橡胶手错觉和猴子手错觉，描述了四个实验，比较了儿童和成人对身体体验的高级认知贡献。我们发现，儿童（5-17 岁）表现出更灵活的身体表现，与成人相比，对小而奇异（猴子）假手的错觉更强。相反，使用间接捕捉手大小变化的任务，我们发现儿童和成人在手大小错觉后，分别在手大和手小的情况下，手大小的统计增加和减少具有统计学意义。有趣的是，在基线时，儿童在手大小判断报告中表现出较大的偏差，随着年龄的增长，这种偏差会减小。最后，我们没有发现儿童或成人的奇幻倾向和奇异（猴子）手错觉强度的个体差异之间存在关系，这表明对自上而下的约束的发展变化并非纯粹由想象和现实之间更扩散的边界驱动。这些数据表明，作用于我们多感觉身体体验的高级约束在发育过程中发生变化，使儿童的身体体验比成人更灵活。
