Study title

This collection includes data from a series of laboratory behavioural experiments. The experiments investigate aspects of perception, action and decision-making. The experiments are described in full in journal articles. Because each dataset is already deposited elsewhere, the collection here serves as a pointer to these deposited data sources.People often have to deal with multiple streams of information at once. For example, imagine you are on a walk out in the woods trying to find a kind of rare bird. You hear a bird call (audio information) and turn towards it. You can see some leaves moving around in a tree (visual information). Neither stream of information is perfectly reliable -- you will tend to make some error one way or another when you try to pinpoint the sound location, and you don't know exactly which leaf the bird was behind -- but both are useful pieces of information. What we see in the lab when we give these kinds of tasks to adults is called 'optimal cue combination'. Adults tend to combine all the different 'cues' available in an 'optimal' way that gets them as close as possible to the right location. To do this, they have to take into account how reliable each cue is, weight each cue by its reliability, and then take a weighted average. Developmental Psychologists have found that children don't begin doing this until they are about 10 or 11 years old; before that, they seem to just ignore one cue or the other (e.g. Nardini, Bedford & Mareschal, 2010). This is surprising because in these studies, children have all the information they need to make more accurate judgments. They are just failing to combine the information in the right way. We want to know why. What is changing at 10-11 years old that allows them to start doing optimal cue combination? We are going to examine two big ideas that might provide good answers to this puzzle. First, children at 10-11 might gain a new ability. They might first develop the ability to learn how to put...