Children’s Perceptual Sensitivity to Optic Flow-Like Visual Motion Differs From Adults

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion informationshapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioralresearch has focused on how children process only one type, linear motion, leaving largely unexploredhow children respond to radial or rotational motion patterns that co-occur with linear motion in everydayvisual experience. This study examined how children and adults detect linear and radial motion patternscorrupted by a range of noise levels. Five to eight-year-old children (n = 25, 16 females; 76%White, 4% Asian, 16% more than one, 4% unknown) and young adults (n = 29, 15 females; 83.33%White, 16.67% Asian) viewed pairs of radial and linear motion displays mixed with random noise atone of two speeds (2 deg/s or 8 deg/s). Participants selected the display with coherent motion. Childrenand adults showed higher accuracy (percent correct) to radial versus linear motion patterns. Childrenhad higher accuracy to the faster speed, while adults showed the opposite pattern. Adults showed betterperformance than children in all conditions. Exploratory analyses showed that male children had higheraccuracy than their female peers.