Immersive virtual reality interferes with default head-trunk coordination strategies in young children

Abstract

Developing coordinated motor control is essential for competent interactions with the surrounding world, and requires a balanced multisensory integration. This integration can be challenged under altered sensory feedback, as is the case for vision in immersive virtual reality (VR). While recent works suggest that a virtual sensory environment alters visuomotor integration in healthy adults, little is known about the effects on younger individuals. Here, we assessed the development of head-trunk coordination in children aged 6 to 10 years and young adults using an immersive flight simulation and a virtual joint angle reproduction task. Contrarily to previous results, when vision was decoupled from the steering body part, only older children and adults displayed a joint ('en-bloc') head-torso operation mode. Our results reveal that immersive VR affects the coordination strategy in younger children, and highlight the immaturity of postural control through the inability to implement a simplified coordination strategy. These findings have implications for pediatric applications of immersive VR, and reveal its usability as an investigation tool for sensorimotor maturation.

Virtual Reality as a Context for Adaptation

“…It may be that young children, who have a less mature prefrontal cortex and feel more presence in virtual environments, might show increased reliance on implicit learning strategies and may consequently experience a greater degree of interference between realworld tasks and VR. Indeed, evidence indicates that VR might interfere with the normal development of sensorimotor coordination (Miehlbradt et al, 2020) due to an increased reliance on the information obtained from the modality with the highest context-dependent reliability (Gori et al, 2008;Nardini et al, 2014). However, we are unaware of systematic investigations about the sensorimotor consequences of prolonged VR engagement in pediatric populations.…”