Visuo-haptic Length Judgments in Children and Adults

If participants simultaneously feel an object and see it through an anamorphic lens, adults judge object size to be in-between seen and felt size [1]. Young children’s judgments were, however, dominated by vision [2]. We investigated whether this age difference depends on the magnitude of the intersensory discrepancy. 6-year old children and adults judged the length of objects that were presented to vision, haptics or both senses. Lenses reduced or magnified seen length. With large intersensory discrepancies, children’s visuo-haptic judgments were dominated by vision (~90% visual weight), whereas adults weighted vision just by ~40%. With smaller discrepancies, the children’s visual weight (~50%) approximated that of the adults (~35%)–and a model of multisensory integration predicted discrimination performance in both age groups. We conclude that children focus on a single sense, when information in different senses is in conflict, but can combine seemingly corresponding multisensory information in similar ways as adults do.