How vision and self-motion combine or compete during path reproduction changes with age.

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 + 

SUBMITTER: Petrini K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4933893 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature