Abstract
AbstractBenefits of synchronous presentation of multisensory compared to unisensory cues are well established. However, the generality of such findings to children's learning with visual and haptic sensory cue pairings is unclear. Children aged 6 to 10 years (N = 180) participated in a novel tabletop category‐learning paradigm with visual, haptic, or visuohaptic informative cues. The results indicated that combinations of complimentary visual and haptic cues facilitated learning above unisensory visual cues only in 8‐year‐old children. Primarily, however, haptic information was found to dominate children's category learning across ages, particularly in the youngest children (6‐year‐olds), even with equal discriminability of haptic and visual exemplars. These findings suggest developmental changes in the ability to effectively combine unrelated visual and haptic information for categorical learning. Implications for the use of nonpertinent visuohaptic cues in learning tasks within educational settings at different ages, and in particular the dominance of haptic stimuli for children's learning, are discussed.Highlights A novel category learning task examined the role of unisensory and multisensory visual and haptic information in children's learning. Haptic cues dominated learning from 6 to 10 years of age, particularly when combined with visual information in older children. Findings infer protracted development of benefits in combining visuohaptic cues, and dominance of haptic over visual information for category learning.
Highlights
Formal learning environments are dynamic and multisensory, with educational tools often requiring children to effectively utilize inputs to multiple sensory modalities
Digit span backwards (DSB) raw ability scores were converted to standardized T-scores and compared across groups using a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)
The role of unisensory and multisensory visual and haptic information for category learning in primary school children was examined in the current study
Summary
Formal learning environments are dynamic and multisensory, with educational tools often requiring children to effectively utilize inputs to multiple sensory modalities. Broadbent et al (2017) found that incidental learning of categorical information was more enhanced with combined, but irrelevant, auditory and visual cues than unisensory cues in primary school children, a facilitatory effect that improved between 6 and 10 years of age Findings such as these are pertinent given that in formal learning environments, cues to different sensory modalities may not always be related, even when both may be informative to learning. The addition of noninformative visual information can enhance perception and increase reaction times to a tactile stimulus on the arm, albeit only when the tactile task was difficult and required the individual to have a spatial representation of their body surface (Press, Taylor-Clarke, Kennett, & Haggard, 2004) Despite these findings from perceptual and object recognition tasks in older children and adults, to our knowledge, there is no research examining the role of visuohaptic information on school-aged children's learning. Given the mixed findings in adults and children regarding the effectiveness of haptic cues for perception and learning, differences between visual and haptic cues in the extent to which children are able to utilize them for learning was anticipated
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