Touch and look: The role of visual‐haptic cues for categorical learning in primary school children

Abstract

Benefits of synchronous presentation of multisensory compared to unisensory cues are well established. However, the generality of such findings to children's learning with visual and haptic sensory cue pairings is unclear. Children aged 6 to 10 years (N = 180) participated in a novel tabletop category‐learning paradigm with visual, haptic, or visuohaptic informative cues. The results indicated that combinations of complimentary visual and haptic cues facilitated learning above unisensory visual cues only in 8‐year‐old children. Primarily, however, haptic information was found to dominate children's category learning across ages, particularly in the youngest children (6‐year‐olds), even with equal discriminability of haptic and visual exemplars. These findings suggest developmental changes in the ability to effectively combine unrelated visual and haptic information for categorical learning. Implications for the use of nonpertinent visuohaptic cues in learning tasks within educational settings at different ages, and in particular the dominance of haptic stimuli for children's learning, are discussed. Highlights A novel category learning task examined the role of unisensory and multisensory visual and haptic information in children's learning. Haptic cues dominated learning from 6 to 10 years of age, particularly when combined with visual information in older children. Findings infer protracted development of benefits in combining visuohaptic cues, and dominance of haptic over visual information for category learning.

Multisensory perception constrains the formation of object categories: a review of evidence from sensory-driven and predictive processes on categorical decisions

“…A subsequent investigation into visuohaptic interactions on novel object categorization performance in children aged 6-10 years also revealed a multisensory benefit to categorization performance, but this emerged late, i.e. in 8-to 9-year-olds [179], consistent with findings on perception. Taken together with results of other studies [180,181], maturation trends were observed across all category learning conditions, suggesting that improved sensory and perceptual precision with development likely underpins multisensory integration for categorization.…”

The L3 Assessment Framework: what we do and do not know about the characterisation of activity component for primary school

“…These cues were behaviour cues, choice boards, communication cues, environmental cues, labels and visual directions. Regarding haptic cues, visuo-haptic cues are increasingly being used in primary school classrooms and have been found to facilitate learning (Broadbent et al. , 2020).…”

“…, 2020). Interestingly, haptic information dominates children’s category learning over visual information especially in younger children (Broadbent et al. , 2020).…”

“…These cues were behaviour cues, choice boards, communication cues, environmental cues, labels and visual directions. Regarding haptic cues, visuo-haptic cues are increasingly being used in primary school classrooms and have been found to facilitate learning (Broadbent et al, 2020). Interestingly, haptic information dominates children's category learning over visual information especially in younger children (Broadbent et al, 2020).…”

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“…Prior to age eight, children's perception of size is dominated by the sense of touch. Beginning from age eight, it is helpful to integrate both visual and tactile information as this enhances spatial and perceptual judgments (Broadbent et al, 2020). By age twelve, tactile information once again dominates children's perception, and their exploration through touch becomes more accurate and nuanced by patterns (Mjsceo et al, 1999).…”