Abstract
When participants are given the opportunity to simultaneously feel an object and see it through a magnifying or reducing lens, adults estimate object size to be in-between visual and haptic size. Studies with young children, however, seem to demonstrate that their estimates are dominated by a single sense. In the present study, we examined whether this age difference observed in previous studies, can be accounted for by the large discrepancy between felt and seen size in the stimuli used in those studies. In addition, we studied the processes involved in combining the visual and haptic inputs. Adults and 6-year-old children judged objects that were presented to vision, haptics or simultaneously to both senses. The seen object length was reduced or magnified by different lenses. In the condition inducing large intersensory discrepancies, children's judgments in visuo-haptic conditions were almost dominated by vision, whereas adults weighted vision just by ~40%. Neither the adults' nor the children's discrimination thresholds were predicted by models of visuo-haptic integration. With smaller discrepancies, the children's visual weight approximated that of the adults and both the children's and adults' discrimination thresholds were well predicted by an integration model, which assumes that both visual and haptic inputs contribute to each single judgment. We conclude that children integrate seemingly corresponding multisensory information in similar ways as adults do, but focus on a single sense, when information from different senses is strongly discrepant.
Highlights
Perception is essentially multimodal, with different senses contributing different aspects to the overall appearance of the environment
While it is obvious that being able to process different information enriches our perception, it is at first glance less clear how the convergence of redundant information from different senses contributes to perception
This conclusion, stands in contrast to studies with infants implying that the integration of spatially and temporally coordinated information from different senses begins during the first year of life already (e.g., Rosenblum et al, 1997; Kerzerho et al, 2008)
Summary
Perception is essentially multimodal, with different senses contributing different aspects to the overall appearance of the environment. Studies with 5- to 6-year-old children imply that their judgments are dominated by one sense, that is, for example, either by visual or by haptical information, depending on testing conditions (Misceo et al, 1999; Gori et al, 2008). A corresponding dominance has been suggested to reflect a lack of multisensory integration (Gori et al, 2008) This conclusion, stands in contrast to studies with infants implying that the integration of spatially and temporally coordinated information from different senses begins during the first year of life already (e.g., Rosenblum et al, 1997; Kerzerho et al, 2008). We argue that in the studies finding unisensory dominance in children (Misceo et al, 1999; Gori et al, 2008) the ways in which stimuli were presented might have suggested to the children that the information provided by the different senses did not originate from one and the same object, and children did not relate the inputs
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