Developmental Changes in Sensitivity to Spatial and Temporal Properties of Sensory Integration Underlying Body Representation

Abstract

The closer in time and space that two or more stimuli are presented, the more likely it is that they will be integrated together. A recent study by Hillock-Dunn and Wallace (2012) reported that the size of the visuo-auditory temporal binding window — the interval within which visual and auditory inputs are highly likely to be integrated — narrows over childhood. However, few studies have investigated how sensitivity to temporal and spatial properties of multisensory integration underlying body representation develops in children. This is not only important for sensory processes but has also been argued to underpin social processes such as empathy and imitation (Schütz-Bosbach et al., 2006). We tested 4 to 11 year-olds’ ability to detect a spatial discrepancy between visual and proprioceptive inputs (Experiment One) and a temporal discrepancy between visual and tactile inputs (Experiment Two) for hand representation. The likelihood that children integrated spatially separated visuo-proprioceptive information, and temporally asynchronous visuo-tactile information, decreased significantly with age. This suggests that spatial and temporal rules governing the occurrence of multisensory integration underlying body representation are refined with age in typical development.

Ripe for solution: Delayed development of multisensory processing in autism and its remediation

“…Sensitivity to temporal coincidence of rhythmic audiovisual stimuli, and to the congruency of native audiovisual speech stimuli, appear to emerge already within the first year of an infant’s life (Lewkowicz, 1996; Lewkowicz, 2003; Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto-Faraco, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009). Yet, multisensory influences on perception and performance are nevertheless greatly reduced in young children when compared to adolescents and young adults (Brandwein et al, 2011; Burr & Gori, 2012; Ernst, 2008; Gori, Sandini, & Burr, 2012; Ross, Del Bene, Molholm, Frey, & Foxe, 2015; Ross et al, 2011) (Cowie, Makin, & Bremner, 2013; Cowie, Sterling, & Bremner, 2016) (Greenfield, Ropar, Themelis, Ratcliffe, & Newport, 2017). Several psychophysics studies found that children younger than eight years of age do not optimally integrate haptic and visual cues, but instead that prior to that point, one sense dominates the other, depending on the specific task demands (Gori, 2015; Gori, Del Viva, Sandini, & Burr, 2008; Gori et al, 2012).…”

The Development of a Flexible Bodily Representation: Behavioral Outcomes and Brain Oscillatory Activity During the Rubber Hand Illusion in Preterm and Full-Term School-Age Children

“…Similarly, the distance between the real hand and the rubber hand has proven to modulate the strength of the illusion (Erro et al, 2020 ), with a significant decrease of illusory effect after a distance of 30 cm (Lloyd, 2007 ). Notably, developmental studies investigating multisensory processes suggest that the spatial distance and the temporal window within which multisensory stimuli are likely to be integrated into a unitary experience narrows over childhood (Greenfield et al, 2017 ), suggesting that children might partially perceive the RHI even during asynchronous conditions. Future investigation should investigate this possibility by systematically manipulating the length of temporal delay and spatial distance between visual and tactile stimulations in an RHI paradigm.…”

The Relative Contributions of Visual and Proprioceptive Inputs on Hand Localization in Early Childhood

“…In Cowie et al's (2013) study, when visualtactile inputs were synchronous, both adults and children aged 4-9-years-old estimated the location of their unseen hand to be closer to the fake hand than in pre-touch baseline conditionsan indication that multisensory integration had taken place. However, unlike adults, even when visual-tactile inputs were asynchronous, 4-9 year old children's made estimates were also closer to the fake hand than in baseline conditions which might suggest either that visual capture by the fake hand dominates proprioception or that the temporal binding of visuo-tactile sensory information is not as tightly constrained in younger children as it is in older children and adults (Greenfield et al, 2015(Greenfield et al, , 2017. Therefore, the involvement of temporal processing in the RHI paradigm, makes it more difficult to determine the weighting of different sensory inputs.…”

“…In summary, although this body of research points to a maturation of sensory integration skills during childhood, the age at which children are reported to become adult-like in flexibly re-weighting sensory inputs appears to vary considerably. This could be due to the extent that the task relies on motor skills (i.e., pointing to the target/hand), temporal processing and/or working memory, all of which improve significantly over childhood ( Takahashi et al, 2003 ; Gathercole et al, 2004 ; Barkley et al, 2014 ; Greenfield et al, 2015 , 2017 ).…”