Development & Dynamics

As children age, the ability to make decisions about perceptual information improves in terms of both speed and accuracy. However, understanding the delicate changes within both the decision-making process and the ability to optimize the trade-off between speed and accuracy with age remains a challenge. This study employed the diffusion decision model to investigate age-related developments in perceptual decision-making. Additionally, the impact of practice and end-of-block feedback on achieving optimal decision-making was investigated. We gathered behavioral data from 299 children aged 6 to 12 and 50 adults while they performed a motion discrimination task. Adults and older children had narrower decision criteria, higher drift rates, and shorter non-decision times compared to younger children. Furthermore, individuals tended to approach the optimal policy as they aged, and for both children and adults, practicing and receiving detailed feedback could speed up the attainment of the optimal policy.

This study investigates the impact of temporal factors on multisensory interactions by examining audiovisual temporal judgments and rapid recalibration across different tasks and age groups. The research consists of two stages. The first stage examines the effect of rapid temporal recalibration in tasks measuring multisensory integration, such as simultaneity judgment (SJ), temporal order judgment (TOJ), and simple reaction time (SRT) in adults. Computational modeling is used to determine the processing level at which rapid temporal recalibration occurs in these tasks. The second stage focuses on the developmental process of rapid temporal recalibration and temporal window of integration (TWI) from childhood to adulthood, specifically studying the TOJ and SRT tasks that, in contrast to SJ, have not been extensively investigated in previous studies. Preliminary analysis using the Drift Diffusion Model reveals that rapid recalibration does not affect the starting point (bias) parameter in both the SJ and TOJ tasks. However, it does impact the drift rate parameter in the TOJ task and the non-decision time parameter in the SJ task. This suggests that there are different processing levels involved in rapid temporal recalibration in these tasks, highlighting their distinct nature. Additionally, the developmental results show that while the TWI extent in the TOJ task reaches maturity in adolescents and becomes similar to adults, it differs in terms of rapid recalibration. Adolescents and children show a heterogeneous and mixed pattern of rapid recalibration, with both negative and positive effects, while adults consistently exhibit positive rapid recalibration. These findings suggest that the effect of rapid recalibration becomes more homogeneous and matures only in adulthood, contrary to the results previously observed in the SJ task. Furthermore, there appears to be no association between the developmental process of TWI and rapid recalibration in the TOJ task, indicating that these two aspects are independent. In summary, the developmental trends and computational modeling results highlight variations in the TWI size and the effect of rapid temporal recalibration among tasks used to measure multisensory integration.