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，孩子们都必须决定缺口是否足够大，以便安全横穿马路。这涉及到评估迎面而来的汽车需要多长时间到达，与他们过马路需要多长时间的关系。过去的研究表明，与成年人相比，儿童的缺口决定和交叉动作协调得不太好。儿童和成年人选择相同大小的差距，但儿童通常会在他们和迎面而来的汽车之间腾出更少的时间。当孩子们刚刚开始步行或骑自行车横穿马路时，将间隙决定与横穿马路的运动紧密联系起来可能特别困难。如果是这样的话，我们可能会认为，行人和骑自行车的人在不同的年龄过马路时，发育模式会重复出现。然而，人们对行人和骑自行车过马路的技能之间的关系知之甚少，因为还没有对这两种技能进行直接比较。这个项目调查了儿童使用视觉信息来指导选择和选择运动行为的时间。研究人员将使用大屏幕、身临其境的步行和骑自行车模拟器来安全和系统地比较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移动时间。这项工作将提供关于儿童感知-运动发展的新信息，在现实世界问题的背景下，视觉信息(即交通)保持不变，但运动模式(即步行和骑自行车)不同。这项研究还将有助于我们了解涉及儿童和机动车的碰撞的风险因素，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降低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.