Sensory Cue Combination in Children Under 10 Years of Age

Abstract

Cue combination occurs when two independent noisy perceptual estimates are merged together as a weighted average, creating a unified estimate that is more precise than either single estimate alone. Surprisingly, this effect has not been demonstrated compellingly in children under the age of 10 years, in contrast with the array of other multisensory skills that children show even in infancy. Instead, across a wide variety of studies, precision with both cues is no better than the best single cue – and sometimes worse. Here we provide the first consistent evidence of cue combination in children from 7–10 years old. Across three experiments, participants showed evidence of a bimodal precision advantage (Experiments 1a and 1b) and the majority were best-fit by a combining model (Experiment 2). The task was to localize a target horizontally with a binaural audio cue and a noisy visual cue in immersive virtual reality. Feedback was given as well, which could both (a) help participants judge how reliable each cue is and (b) help correct between-cue biases that might prevent cue combination. A feedback effect was found in Experiment 2, with children who were given single-cue feedback showing the highest rate of cue combination. Given this, we suggest that children at 7–10 years old are capable of cue combination in principle, but must have sufficient representations of reliabilities and biases in their own perceptual estimates as relevant to the task, which can be facilitated through task-specific feedback.

Multisensory Integration Develops Prior to Crossmodal Recalibration

“…Thus, their data (in 7-to 10-year-old children) and our behavioral and modeling results for the VE (in 5-to 9-year-old children) suggest that children are capable to integrate auditory and visual spatial cues and that audio-visual localization does not reflect an unspecific visual bias or alternative strategies such as cue switching. In contrast to the present study, Negen et al [19] reported a precision advantage with bimodal stimuli as predicted by the MLE model, whereas the MLE model did not fit our data well. These authors told their participants that both the visual and the auditory stimulus indicated the location of a hidden character, which had to be localized.…”

“…By contrast, the SW model was not able to explain the results of Experiment 1. These findings are in line with results from Negen et al [19], who recently reported that children under 10 years of age are able to integrate auditory and visual cues in an audio-visual spatial localization task. Thus, their data (in 7-to 10-year-old children) and our behavioral and modeling results for the VE (in 5-to 9-year-old children) suggest that children are capable to integrate auditory and visual spatial cues and that audio-visual localization does not reflect an unspecific visual bias or alternative strategies such as cue switching.…”

Central tendency biases must be accounted for to consistently capture Bayesian cue combination in continuous response data

“…Here, we demonstrate the effect of a central tendency bias on estimates of the combination effect in previously published data. We re-analyzed the data from Experiment 1 in an article recently published in Cognition (Negen et al, 2019). This study presented 77 7-to 10-year-old children with audio, visual, or audio-visual cues to a horizontal location.…”

Central tendency biases must be accounted for to consistently capture Bayesian cue combination in continuous response data

“…Here, we demonstrate the effect of a central tendency bias on estimates of the combination effect in previously published data. We re-analysed the data from Experiment 1 in an article recently published in Cognition (Negen et al, 2019). This study presented 77 7-10 year old children with audio, visual, or audio-visual cues to a horizontal location.…”