Abstract
Human adults can optimally integrate visual and non-visual self-motion cues when navigating, while children up to 8 years old cannot. Whether older children can is unknown, limiting our understanding of how our internal multisensory representation of space develops. Eighteen adults and fifteen 10- to 11-year-old children were guided along a two-legged path in darkness (self-motion only), in a virtual room (visual + self-motion), or were shown a pre-recorded walk in the virtual room while standing still (visual only). Participants then reproduced the path in darkness. We obtained a measure of the dispersion of the end-points (variable error) and of their distances from the correct end point (constant error). Only children reduced their variable error when recalling the path in the visual + self-motion condition, indicating combination of these cues. Adults showed a constant error for the combined condition intermediate to those for single cues, indicative of cue competition, which may explain the lack of near-optimal integration in this group. This suggests that later in childhood humans can gain from optimally integrating spatial cues even when in the same situation these are kept separate in adulthood.
Highlights
It is irrelevant are consistent with the possibility that they rely heavily on visual information, e.g. to calibrate other sensory cues
Both child and adult participants walked a two-legged path under a self-motion only condition, a visual +self-motion condition, and a visual only condition
They reproduced the same path in darkness
Summary
It is irrelevant are consistent with the possibility that they rely heavily on visual information, e.g. to calibrate other sensory cues. There was no decrease in the variance of responses when both visual and self-motion cues were available on the outbound path compared to when the outbound path was walked in darkness, even when both types of cue were consistent This indicates that adult participants did not show the potential benefits of optimal combination of vision with self-motion. Zhao and Warren[23] show evidence in favour of this in a homing study (object relocation task, similar to that of Nardini, et al.)[9] They measured both response variability (how tightly clustered their chosen object relocation positions were) and accuracy (how close the clustered chosen positions were to the correct position) and showed that while adult participants behaved according to optimal cue combination in their homing variability response, they behaved according to cue competition in their homing accuracy response. If participants remember a multisensory representation of the path that integrates visual and self-motion cues, participants’ variability should decrease and accuracy should increase during the subsequent path reproduction in darkness in the combined visual +self-motion condition compared to the visual or self-motion conditions
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