A Psychophysical Measure of Visual and Kinaesthetic Spatial Discriminative Abilities of Adults and Children

Quantitative estimates of the spatial discriminative capacities of the visual and kinaesthetic systems in adults and children were obtained. Intersensory integration was investigated by including spatial discriminations based on congruent visual plus kinaesthetic reafference. The psychophysical method of adjustment was used with simultaneous comparisons of a fixed and a variable stimulus. The subject's task was to estimate when the variable stimulus (ellipse) was identical to the standard one (circle), under one of three modality conditions: vision, kinaesthesis, and vision plus kinaesthesis.

After a pilot study with adults, children (aged 8, 10, and 12 years) and adults were both tested. Subjects from each age group were randomly allocated to each of the three experimental conditions. Results show that the visual and kinaesthetic estimates of the 8- and 10-year-old subjects did not differ significantly, but the visual responses of the adults and 12 year olds were significantly more accurate than corresponding kinaesthetic estimates. Bisensory estimates were significantly more accurate than visual responses only for the 8- and 10-year-old age groups. Intramodal comparisons showed the kinaesthetic estimates of the 8, 10, and 12 year olds to be significantly more accurate than the corresponding adult performance. Adult visual estimates were significantly more accurate than those made by 8 year olds, but were not significantly different from the visual responses of 10 and 12 year olds. Estimates based on bisensory reafference did not differ from each other across the four age groups. It is concluded that modality adeptness and dominance are task dependent and empirically determined rather than being innate properties of sensory systems. The data indicate that intersensory differentiation rather than integration occurs with maturity.