Nature reports on two new studies showing that young children navigate the world using different information than adults:

Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.

Children over the age of eight showed results similar to adults on tasks in which information was available from various senses. In one study, sight and touch were used, and adults performed worst when only able to use sight or touch, and best when able to use both. However, children under the age of eight performed no differently.

“The results suggest that children don’t integrate, but instead ‘alternate’ between sources of information, [says developmental cognitive psychologist Virginia Slaughter.]”

Psychosocial and other cognitive development have been shown (billions of times) to continue much after birth, so these results are nothing shocking. But still, it is always interesting (and useful) to have experiments show behavioral correlates to the neural underpinnings.

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