Young Children’s Haptic Exploratory Procedures

摘要

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.