Touch and look: the role of visual-haptic cues for categorical learning in children

Benefits of synchronous presentation of multisensory compared to unisensory cues are well established. However, the generality of such findings to children’s learning with visual and haptic sensory cue pairings is unclear. Children aged six to ten years (N=180) participated in a novel table-top category learning paradigm with visual, haptic or visuo-haptic informative cues. The results indicated that combinations of complimentary visual and haptic cues facilitated learning above unisensory visual cues only in 8-year-old children. Primarily, however, haptic information was found to dominate children’s category learning across ages, particularly in the youngest children (six-year-olds), even with equal discriminability of haptic and visual exemplars. These findings suggest developmental changes in the ability to effectively combine un-related visual and haptic information for categorical learning. Implications for the use of non-pertinent visuohaptic cues in learning tasks within educational settings at different ages, and in particular the dominance of haptic stimuli for children’s learning are discussed