Using economic theory to understand children's risky visuomotor decisions

In playgrounds, traffic and around the house, we are at continuous risk of bodily injury. Children are particularly accident-prone, as reflected in the disproportionally high accident-rates of pedestrians aged 15 year and younger. In recent years many researchers, including myself, have made considerable strides in understanding how visuomotor abilities improve across development. Despite these advances in understanding, current approaches do not consider how children adjust for their changing abilities to avoid unnecessary bodily risk during everyday visuomotor decisions. For example, children are less efficient than adults at avoiding incoming traffic when crossing busy roads. Do they account for this correctly by waiting for larger gaps between cars before crossing?

Economic decision-making theories will be employed to model children's visuomotor choices. Economists identify the best financial investments by trading-off probabilities of positive and negative monetary outcomes. Likewise, such tactics can identify the best movement strategy (e.g., when to cross) that maximises safety and efficiency (e.g., avoids accidents but utilises safe gaps in traffic). This has proven very effective for modelling mature visuomotor behaviour, showing that adults often choose movements that optimise performance. Recently I pioneered this approach with children, showing that children aged 6 to 11 years make riskier visuomotor choices than adults during manual reaching. To understand and reduce the effects of risky action selection on childhood injury, we must characterise more broadly how visuomotor decision-making develops, and understand which neurocognitive processes drive this change. A combination of precise behavioural tests, mathematical modelling and neuroimaging will be used to address these fundamental questions.

This proposal consists of 3 main objectives that each form a necessary step towards understanding children's movements under real risk in real world situations; These are to (1) characterise children's risky visuomotor decisions in realistic circumstances, including whole-body movements and poor eye-sight, (2) identify which basic mental processes underlie children's immature visuomotor choices, and (3) investigate how these might be improved through training. By characterising changes in visuomotor decision-making in detail at the behavioural and neural level, these objectives will significantly advance our understanding of the developing visuomotor system in action and the mechanisms of visuomotor decision-making. Moreover, this project has great translational potential for improving childhood safety and well being in everyday life, by informing educational programs and generating new ideas for interventions to improve safety.

This project aims to determine how decisions about how and when to move the body (i.e., to reach goals and avoid accidents) become optimised during childhood. There are several non-scientific beneficiaries of this work:

1) Traffic Safety Policy Officers: This work is of great interest to policy-makers concerned with child safety and risk-prevention. In the "Road Safety Policy" published by the UK's Department of Transport as well as in the Dutch government's "strategic traffic safety plan 2008-2020", children are identified as a focus point because this age category shows disproportionally high accident-rates in both countries. Developing age-appropriate training programs and improving understanding of the causes of accidents, are identified as specific action points. The objectives of this project are therefore directly relevant to societal needs prioritised by governmental policymakers both in- and outside the UK.

2) Traffic Safety Organisations: The gained knowledge will also be of great interest to traffic safety organisations and initiatives such as "THINK" and "Road Safety GB". "THINK" is the main developer of traffic education materials for primary school children in the UK, and Road Safety GB takes charge of regional traffic education and is involved in the assessment and improvement of child safety in public areas. In pursuit of these goals, both organisations are continuously looking for new didactic insights and tools that assess safety effectively (think.direct.gov.uk; roadsafetygb.org.uk). The current project is highly relevant to these activities, as it focuses on almost unexplored aspects of visuomotor behaviour in childhood, and thus may open up new avenues for the development of education and risk-assessment tools.

3) Children, Families and Schools: The proposed research takes steps towards understanding the unnecessary risks children take in their everyday visuomotor behaviour, and how this might be improved through training. Families with children, and the schools these children attend are therefore a third group that stands to benefit from this work.

4) Athletes and Circus Performers: For all athletes, it is important to maximise the chance of successful action outcomes (e.g., scoring a goal) by choosing optimal movements. This is particularly true for circus artists, who often engage in extremely dangerous visuomotor activities. For these individuals, reducing the chance of failure can be vital, and forms a major part of their training. The work described in this proposal is therefore of interest to this group, in offering a new scientific perspective on their day-to-day activities.

5) Patients Groups at Potential Risk of Poor Visuomotor Decision-Making: The experiments described in this proposal can in the future be used to investigate which clinical groups are at risk of making inefficient movement choices. Identifying such groups can help identify individuals who may benefit most from training to improve this ability. While clinical testing is not the aim of this project, the experiments already set the stage for follow-up research with two clinical target groups (i.e., individuals with ADHD and with recent clinical vision loss). My strong connections with Moorfields Eye Hospital will help me recruit vision patients. My collaborations with UCL colleagues investigating developmental disorders (i.e., Prof. Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Prof. Janette Atkinson, Dr. Liz Pellicano and Prof. Essi Viding, mentor on this project) will help me reach individuals with ADHD.