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Children's use of visual information in action planning

The primary intent of this study was to gain insight into children's ability to use visual information in planning reaching movements. More specifically, the work presented here examined, from a developmental perspective, the use of visual information to use a) egocentric cues, b) allocentric cues, and c) the combination, in the form of visual background around a target. Children representing the age groups 5-, 7-, 9-, 11 years and adults participated in three experiments. All experiments were conducted using an immediate (visually-guided) and response-delay (memory-guided) paradigm. Experiment 1 examined the ability of participants to use an egocentric frame of reference to estimate reach via motor imagery. Results indicated that introducing a >̲ 2s delay affected responses in all age groups, especially the younger age groups (5- and 7-year-olds). As delay increased, children as a group tended to overestimate, while adults underestimated. Experiment 2 investigated how participants used allocentric cues to estimate the location of objects in a perceptual estimate paradigm. Results revealed that introducing a delay affected the estimation of distance among all age groups, with greater effect on the younger age groups. Experiment 3 examined how a visual background surrounding a target would affect estimation of reach. Results revealed that there were no differences when targets were surrounded with or without a background. Results also showed that the 5- and 7-year-olds were most affected on their perception of reach and estimates by longer delays. Considered together, these results hint that: (1) there is a significant temporal constraint on the representation of movement through the visoumotor stream, especially with children 7 years and younger, and (2) children as a whole tend to operate and rely more on an egocentric frame of reference; therefore, responses of reachability and distance estimates were susceptible to greater error when performed after a 2s delay.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2008-12-179
Date2008 December 1900
CreatorsCordova, Alberto
ContributorsGabbard, Carl
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf

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