How children and adults learn to intercept moving gaps.

We used an immersive virtual environment to examine how children and adults learn to intercept moving gaps and whether children and adults benefit from variability of practice. Children (10- and 12-year-olds) and adults attempted to bicycle between two moving vehicle-size blocks without stopping. In Experiment 1, block motions were timed such that if participants maintained a constant speed, they would intercept the gap between the blocks.

Manipulating perception versus action in recalibration tasks.

We conducted six experiments to examine how manipulating perception versus action affects perception-action recalibration in real and imagined blindfolded walking tasks. Participants first performed a distance estimation task (pretest) and then walked through an immersive virtual environment on a treadmill for 10 min. Participants then repeated the distance estimation task (posttest), the results of which were compared with their pretest performance.

Perceiving and acting on complex affordances: how children and adults bicycle across two lanes of opposing traffic.

This investigation examined how children and adults negotiate a challenging perceptual-motor problem with significant real-world implications--bicycling across two lanes of opposing traffic. Twelve- and 14-year-olds and adults rode a bicycling simulator through an immersive virtual environment. Participants crossed intersections with continuous cross traffic coming from opposing directions.

An immersive virtual peer for studying social influences on child cyclists' road-crossing behavior.

The goal of our work is to develop a programmatically controlled peer to bicycle with a human subject for the purpose of studying how social interactions influence road-crossing behavior. The peer is controlled through a combination of reactive controllers that determine the gross motion of the virtual bicycle, action-based controllers that animate the virtual bicyclist and generate verbal behaviors, and a keyboard interface that allows an experimenter to initiate the virtual bicyclist's actions during the course of an experiment. The virtual bicyclist's repertoire of behaviors includes road following, riding alongside the human rider, stopping at intersections, and crossing intersections through specified gaps in traffic.

Synchronizing self and object movement: how child and adult cyclists intercept moving gaps in a virtual environment.

Two experiments examined how 10- and 12-year-old children and adults intercept moving gaps while bicycling in an immersive virtual environment. Participants rode an actual bicycle along a virtual roadway. At 12 test intersections, participants attempted to pass through a gap between 2 moving, car-sized blocks without stopping.