Nonlinear age effects in tactile processing from early childhood to adulthood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Tactile processing plays a pivotal role in the early stages of human development; however, little is known about tactile function in young children. An understanding of how tactile processing changes with age from early childhood to adulthood is fundamental in understanding altered tactile experiences in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, 142 children and adults aged 3-23 years completed a vibrotactile testing battery consisting of 5 tasks, which rely on different cortical and cognitive mechanisms. The battery was designed to be suitable for testing in young children to investigate how tactile processing changes from early childhood to adulthood. RESULTS: Our results suggest a pattern of rapid, age-related changes in tactile processing toward lower discrimination thresholds (lower discrimination thresholds = greater sensitivity) across early childhood, though we acknowledge limitations with cross-sectional data. Differences in the rate of change across tasks were observed, with tactile performance reaching adult-like levels at a younger age on some tasks compared to others. CONCLUSIONS: While it is known that early childhood is a period of profound development including tactile processing, our data provides evidence for subtle differences in the developmental rate of the various underlying cortical, physical, and cognitive processes. Further, we are the first to show the feasibility of vibrotactile testing in early childhood (<6 years). The results of this work provide estimates of age-related differences in performance, which could have important implications as a reference for investigating altered tactile processing in developmental disorders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".