Risky visuomotor choices during rapid reaching in childhood

Dekker, T.M.; Nardini, M.

Abstract

Many everyday actions are implicit gambles because imprecisions in our visuomotor systems place probabilities on our success or failure. Choosing optimal action strategies involves weighting the costs and gains of potential outcomes by their corresponding probabilities, and requires stable representations of one's own imprecisions. How this ability is acquired during development in childhood when visuomotor skills change drastically is unknown. In a rewarded rapid reaching task, 6- to 11-year-old children followed ‘risk-seeking’ strategies leading to overly high point-loss. Adults' performance, in contrast, was close to optimal. Children's errors were not explained by distorted estimates of value or probability, but may reflect different action selection criteria or immature integration of value and probability information while planning movements. These findings provide a starting point for understanding children's risk-taking in everyday visuomotor situations when suboptimal choices can be dangerous. Moreover, children's risky visuomotor decisions mirror those reported for non-motor gambles, raising the possibility that common processes underlie development across decision-making domains.

Citation

Dekker, T., & Nardini, M. (2016). Risky visuomotor choices during rapid reaching in childhood. Developmental Science, 19(3), 427-439. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12322

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 2, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Jul 17, 2015
• Publication Date: May 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 21, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 17, 2016
• Journal: Developmental Science
• Print ISSN: 1363-755X
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-7687
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 427-439
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12322
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1430950