Poster #75 - Spatial action-effect binding with spatially incompatible effects in children

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Spatial binding is the perceived attraction of an action effector towards the location of the perceptual effect of the respective action. It is assumed to result from multisensory integration of the action’s sensory effects (e.g. Kirsch et al., 2016), where especially the spatial compatibility between the action and the effect seem to play a role (Liesner, Kirsch et al., 2020). Research on multisensory integration showed that children from 6 years integrate visual and tactile information (Verhaar et al., 2022). However, the visuomotor representation of the body is still under development in early childhood (Contreras-Vidal et al., 2005). Therefore, children might not be as susceptible to spatial action-effect compatibility as adults. The present study assessed spatial binding in compatible and incompatible situations in 38 children (Mage = 6.75 years) and 42 young adults (Mage = 21.48 years). Participants were moving an occluded stylus on a tablet with their right hand, thereby moving a cursor on the computer screen to a goal location that was in six different distances from the stylus. There were three conditions (18 trials each): the baseline condition, with the cursor not moving; the additive condition, with the cursor moving in the same direction; and the inverted condition, with the cursor moving in the opposite direction. Once they reached the goal, the participants indicated the current location of their hand, using the numbers of a ruler that was attached to the screen. For each participant and condition, we computed a linear regression on the spatial binding over the distances (see Table 1) and compared the standardized regression coefficients with a repeated-measures ANOVA. There was a main effect of condition (F(2,75) = 30.71, p < .001), but no interaction effect between condition and age. Adults as well as children showed significant spatial binding in the additive condition (t(77) = 7.11, p < .001), but not in the inverted condition (t(77) = 1.74, p = .09) when compared to the baseline condition. The effect was also significantly greater in the additive than in the inverted condition (t(77) = 5.18, p <.001). However, while adults showed a typical reduction of spatial binding with incompatible action-effect transformations, this reduction was descriptively smaller in children when their right hand was positioned to the left of their body (see Figure 1). Thus, children and adults seem to integrate visual and kinesthetic information in a similar fashion, while this integration seems to differ in anatomically uncommon limb positions. Further supporting this observation is that it would be in line with cross-hand deficits in children (Pagel et al., 2009). Together, this might suggest that the process of multisensory integration is still under development in early childhood.

Authors

• Nina-Alisa Hinz, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  Presenting Author

• Marvin Liesner

• Markus Paulus, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Wilfried Kunde, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg