Children's Use of Visual Information to Guide Selection and Timing of Motor Behaviors

无论是骑自行车还是步行过马路，孩子们都必须决定是否有足够大的间隙来安全过马路。这包括评估迎面而来的汽车到达所需的时间与他们穿过街道所需的时间之间的关系。过去的研究表明，与成人相比，儿童的间隙决定和穿越动作的协调性较差。儿童和成人选择的距离大小相同，但儿童与迎面而来的汽车之间的空闲时间通常更少。当孩子们刚刚开始自己步行或骑自行车过马路时，将间隙决定和过马路动作紧密联系起来可能特别困难。如果是这样，我们可以预期行人和骑自行车的人过马路的发育模式在不同年龄段会重复出现。然而，人们对行人和骑自行车的人过马路的技能之间的关系知之甚少，因为没有对这两种技能进行直接比较。这个项目研究儿童使用视觉信息来指导运动行为的选择和时机。研究人员将使用大屏幕、沉浸式行人和自行车模拟器来安全、系统地比较6至12岁的儿童在步行和骑自行车穿过十字路口时如何选择间隙和运动时间。在现实世界中，视觉信息（如交通）保持不变，但运动模式不同（如步行与骑自行车），这项工作将为儿童的感知运动发展提供新的信息。这项研究还将有助于我们了解涉及儿童和机动车辆碰撞的风险因素，这是一个重大的公共卫生问题。因此，这项工作将有助于为未来旨在减少此类碰撞风险的干预研究奠定基础。

Whether bicycling or walking across roads, children must make decisions about whether gaps are large enough for safe crossing. This involves assessing how long it will take for the oncoming car to arrive in relation to how long it will take for them to cross the street. Past work suggests that gap decisions and crossing movements are less well coordinated in children than in adults. Children and adults choose the same size gaps, but children typically end up with less time to spare between themselves and the oncoming car. Tightly linking gap decisions and crossing movements may be particularly difficult when children are just beginning walk or bicycle across roads on their own. If so, we might expect developmental patterns to repeat themselves at different ages for pedestrian and cyclist road crossing. However, little is known about how pedestrian and cyclist road-crossing skills are related to each other because there have been no direct comparisons of the two skills. This project examines children's use of visual information to guide selection and timing of motor behaviors. The investigators will use large-screen, immersive pedestrian and bicycling simulators to safely and systematically compare how 6- to 12-year-old children select gaps and time their movement when walking vs. bicycling across intersections.This work will provide new information about children's perceptual-motor development in the context of a real-world problem where the visual information (i.e., traffic) stays the same, but the mode of locomotion differs (i.e., walking vs. bicycling). This research will also contribute to our understanding of the risk factors for collisions involving children and motor vehicles, a significant public health problem. As such, this work will help lay the foundation for future intervention studies designed to reduce the risk of such collisions.