Young children’s haptic exploratory procedures

Abstract

Adults vary their haptic exploratory behavior reliably with variation both in the sensory input and in the task goals. Little is known about the development of these connections between perceptual goals and exploratory behaviors. Thirty-six children 3, 4, and 5 years of age and 20 adults completed a haptic intra-modal match-to-sample task. Participants were instructed to feel the shape, texture, rigidity, or weight of a sample object, and then asked to find which of three test objects matched the sample on that specific property. Hand movements were examined to determine whether children produced the same exploratory procedures while gathering perceptual information about each property as adults who searched for the same kind of information. Children demonstrated that they had good haptic abilities in two ways: they matched the sample objects on the specified perceptual dimension at near ceiling levels, and they produced the same hand movement patterns to find the same properties as adults.

The use of exploratory procedures by blind and sighted adults and children

“…The finding that children are able to execute the same EPs as adults is in line with the results of Kalagher and Jones (2011), who concluded that children produced adult-like EPs and matched the sample objects correctly to the standard on the different dimensions. Moreover, we found that both children and adults used some additional EPs, sometimes alone and sometimes in combination with the dominant EP.…”

“…According to Bushnell and Boudreau, the onset of all EPs is thus in the first year of life. Kalagher and Jones (2011) recently assessed 36 sighted children (3-5 years) and 20 adults with a haptic match-tosample task. The participants could not see their hands during the experiment.…”

Crossmodal enhancement in the LOC for visuohaptic object recognition over development

“…There is a possibility that the left-lateralized bias found in the LOC in some studies (e.g., Kim, Stevenson, & James, 2012; Yalachkov et al, 2015) may be due not solely to the hand used to explore the stimulus, but also to the strong right-handed preference of the participants tested in these studies. Thus, to mitigate hand-in-use effects in the current study, haptic exploration was performed bimanually similar to other developmental studies of young children (Bushnell & Baxt, 1999; Kalagher & Jones, 2011a, 2011b). Additionally, to minimize differences in handedness preference, we recruited mostly right-handed participants, and did not include any strongly left-preferring participants.…”

“…It was decided based on several reasons that behavioral responses would not be recorded during the MRI scan. First, both children and adults show a reliable preference for two-handed haptic exploration of 3D objects, particularly with regard to shape recognition (Lederman & Klatzky, 1987; Kalagher & Jones, 2011a, 2011b). To include a button press response would restrict exploration to the unnatural single-handed mode, which would likely be more distracting for children than adults.…”

“…Additionally, research has shown that the manner in which infants and children haptically explore objects influences concurrent and later visual perception (Ruff, 1984, 1986, 1989; Bushnell & Boudreau, 1993), and more adult-like patterns of visuomotor exploration at 24 months result in an increase in some measures of visual object recognition (James, Swain, Jones, & Smith, 2013). By 4 to 5 years of age, children’s patterns of haptic object exploration begin to appear stereotypically adult-like (Kalagher & Jones, 2011a, 2011b), and intramodal haptic object recognition is highly accurate (Bushnell & Baxt, 1999). Nevertheless, crossmodal visuohaptic recognition abilities at this age are not yet adult-like.…”