Sensitivity to the temporal coherence of visual and tactile signals increases perceptual reliability and is evident during infancy. However, it is not clear how, or whether, bidirectional visuotactile interactions change across childhood. Furthermore, no study has explored whether viewing a body modulates how children perceive visuotactile sequences of events. Here, children aged 5–7 years (n = 19), 8 and 9 years (n = 21), and 10–12 years (n = 24) and adults (n = 20) discriminated the number of target events (one or two) in a task-relevant modality (touch or vision) and ignored distractors (one or two) in the opposing modality. While participants performed the task, an image of either a hand or an object was presented. Children aged 5–7 years and 8 and 9 years showed larger crossmodal interference from visual distractors when discriminating tactile targets than the converse. Across age groups, this was strongest when two visual distractors were presented with one tactile target, implying a “fission-like” crossmodal effect (perceiving one event as two events). There was no influence of visual context (viewing a hand or non-hand image) on visuotactile interactions for any age group. Our results suggest robust interference from discontinuous visual information on tactile discrimination of sequences of events during early and middle childhood. These findings are discussed with respect to age-related changes in sensory dominance, selective attention, and multisensory processing.

对视觉和触觉信号的时间连贯性的敏感性增加了感知的可靠性，并且在婴儿期很明显。然而，尚不清楚双向视觉触觉交互如何或是否在整个童年时期发生变化。此外，还没有研究探讨观察身体是否会调节儿童对视觉触觉序列的感知。在这里，5-7 岁 ( n  = 19)、8 和 9 岁 ( n  = 21) 以及 10-12 岁 ( n  = 24) 和成人 ( n = 20）区分任务相关模式（触摸或视觉）中的目标事件（一个或两个）的数量，并忽略相反模式中的干扰因素（一个或两个）。当参与者执行任务时，会呈现手或物体的图像。5-7 岁和 8 岁和 9 岁的儿童在区分触觉目标时表现出比相反的更大的来自视觉干扰物的交叉模式干扰。在各个年龄组中，当两个视觉干扰物与一个触觉目标一起呈现时，这种情况最强，这意味着“裂变式”交叉模态效应（将一个事件视为两个事件）。视觉环境（查看手部或非手部图像）对任何年龄组的视觉触觉交互都没有影响。我们的结果表明，不连续的视觉信息对儿童早期和中期事件序列的触觉辨别产生了强烈的干扰。这些发现讨论了与年龄相关的感官优势、选择性注意和多感官处理的变化。