Children can optimally integrate multisensory information after a short action‐like mini game training

Abstract

Combining information across different sensory modalities is of critical importancefor the animal's survival and a core feature of human's everyday life. In adulthood, sensory information is often integrated in a statistically optimal fashion, so that the combined estimates of two or more senses are more reliable than the best single one.Several studies have shown that young children use one sense to calibrate the others, which results in unisensory dominance and undermines their optimal multisensory integration abilities. In this study we trained children aged 4-5 years with actionlike mini games, to determine whether it could improve their multisensory as well as their visuo-spatial skills. Multisensory integration abilities were assessed using a visuo-haptic size discrimination task, while visuo-spatial attention skills were investigated using a multiple object tracking task (MOT). We found that 2-weeks training were sufficient to observe both optimal multisensory integration and visuo-spatial enhancements selectively in the group trained with action-like mini games. This plastic change persisted up to 3 months, as assessed in a follow-up. Our novel findings reveal that abilities that are commonly known to emerge in late childhood can be promoted in younger children through action-like mini games and have long-lasting effects. Our data have clinical implications, in that they suggest that specific trainings could potentially help children with multisensory integration deficits. K E Y W O R D Sdevelopment, learning, multisensory integration, plasticity, video games, visuo-spatial skills S U PP O RTI N G I N FO R M ATI O NAdditional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section at the end of the article.How to cite this article: Nava E, Föcker J, Gori M. Children can optimally integrate multisensory information after a short action-like mini game training. Dev Sci. 2020; 23:e12840. https ://doi.

Auditory-induced body distortions in children and adults

“…Along with a self-report, we also measured the recalibration of finger position, hypothesising that if the illusion also contributes to more implicit characteristics of body perception (i.e., the body schema), participants would recalibrate their finger position sense upwards with respect to the real position of their finger. In particular, given the impaired multisensory integration processes in children documented in other studies [30][31][32] we expected two possible outcomes: on the one hand, if children tend not to integrate audio-haptic information, this will reflect on the mechanisms underlying the illusion, thus preventing them from perceiving the illusion; on the other hand though, studies have shown that children up to 6 years of age present an auditory dominance 43 , and this may reflect on this illusion too, thus promoting perception of the illusion.…”

El desarrollo de la comunicación preverbal y verbal temprana. La importancia del juego

“…Del mismo modo sucede para entender las intenciones de los demás en contextos comunicativos. El juego sería el principal medio para el desarrollo del niño, ya que se considera su medio de comunicación predominante, sirviendo para vincular intenciones y acciones con el significado de los objetos y situaciones (Rodríguez, 2009) Es por ello que los niños jugando comienzan a comprender los signos intencionales en contextos comunicativos, precisamente por el vínculo con los objetos a los que se refieren estos signos (Nava, Föcker, & Gori, 2020).…”

Bayesian causal inference in visuotactile integration in children and adults

“…The developmental time course of the ability to integrate multisensory cues is still under debate. In some studies, only children older than 8 years were found to integrate sensory cues in a Bayes optimal fashion (Dekker et al, 2015;Gori et al, 2008;Nardini et al, 2008Nardini et al, , 2010Nardini et al, , 2013Petrini et al, 2014;Scheller et al, 2021), whereas in other studies, younger children also appeared to be able to integrate, potentially as a result of differences in task and feedback (Negen et al, 2019;Rohlf et al, 2020), or due to training (Nava et al, 2020).…”