The role of head and trunk movements must be taken into account to understand how we process spatial information. To date, no robust methodology allows for such investigation; therefore, we created the VRCR platform. It is a virtual reality archery-like serious game for the assessment of head-trunk motor coordination, head-trunk visuomotor transformation, egocentric space encoding and their relationship. In the VRCR, the user controls the arrow trajectory through head and/or trunk rotations, and experimenters can change the visual consequence of such rotations (i.e., rotating the trunk causes the visual field to rotate too). It comes with a pipeline to analyze both spatial performance and motor behavior. Given its game nature, it is suitable for testing children. A demonstrative experiment was performed on adults, 10-11 year-old children and 6-7 year-old children to directly assess whether people at different development stages could preserve their spatial performance once their head-trunk visuomotor transformation was altered. The visuomotor transformation alteration was detrimental for 6 year-old children's spatial performance and head-trunk motor coordination. The same was not true for children aged 10. Such difference suggests the egocentric reference frame transition away from the trunk between 7 and 9 years of age. The experiment demonstrated the platform's usefulness in simplifying the study of such a complex system by disentangling its components.
Virtual reality archery to quantify the development of head-trunk coordination, visuomotor transformation and egocentric spatial representation
Esposito D.;
2021-01-01
Abstract
The role of head and trunk movements must be taken into account to understand how we process spatial information. To date, no robust methodology allows for such investigation; therefore, we created the VRCR platform. It is a virtual reality archery-like serious game for the assessment of head-trunk motor coordination, head-trunk visuomotor transformation, egocentric space encoding and their relationship. In the VRCR, the user controls the arrow trajectory through head and/or trunk rotations, and experimenters can change the visual consequence of such rotations (i.e., rotating the trunk causes the visual field to rotate too). It comes with a pipeline to analyze both spatial performance and motor behavior. Given its game nature, it is suitable for testing children. A demonstrative experiment was performed on adults, 10-11 year-old children and 6-7 year-old children to directly assess whether people at different development stages could preserve their spatial performance once their head-trunk visuomotor transformation was altered. The visuomotor transformation alteration was detrimental for 6 year-old children's spatial performance and head-trunk motor coordination. The same was not true for children aged 10. Such difference suggests the egocentric reference frame transition away from the trunk between 7 and 9 years of age. The experiment demonstrated the platform's usefulness in simplifying the study of such a complex system by disentangling its components.
I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
