Linking Decisions and Actions in Dynamic Environments: How Child and Adult Cyclists Cross Roads With Traffic

Abstract

Unlike affordances involving stationary objects, affordances involving moving objects change over time. This means that actions must be tightly linked to decisions, making perceiving and acting on affordances involving moving objects challenging for children and adults alike. Here, we overview our program of research on how children and adults perceive and act on moving objects in the context of bicycling across roads in an immersive virtual environment. This work shows that although children attempt to adjust their actions to fit their risky decisions, they do not fully adjust their decisions to fit their action capabilities. This mismatch between child cyclists' decisions and actions may be a risk factor for car-bicycle collisions in late childhood and early adolescence.