Study Results

The term personal space refers to an area close to the body (about as far as the arm reaches) within which our actions take place. We also know that personal space has a special significance for our personal well-being - for example if an insect "invades" our personal space, we perceive it as unpleasant or even threatening. Research on adults has shown that our personal space bundles information from all our senses to support our actions. Furthermore, it changes when we use tools. For example, if we use a long stick to pull an object beyond our reach, this expands our personal space. This can be seen in the way that people subsequently judge the distance of objects to be smaller than before - the objects seem to have "moved" within reach. We would now like to explore whether such processes can also be demonstrated in children when they "grasp" objects with a tool.

The children are presented with various toys on a stick, which they continuously approach. Meanwhile, we measure when and how the children reach for the respective objects. From this, we can deduce how far away the child perceived the different objects to be. For the rest of the process, we divide the children into two groups. Children in the "tool group" are to try in another run to use a tool to pull objects that are at different distances from them toward them. Children in the "control group" play with new toys at the table during this time. We then repeat the stick task in which children are asked to reach for toys. We are now interested in whether children of the tool group reach for the presented toy earlier after tool use than they did before and whether they differ from children of the control group. The surveys are currently still ongoing.

We all make mistakes from time to time—but what actually happens in our brain when we do? When do we recognize errors, and how do we learn from them?
In our study, we investigated how error processing during motor learning changes across development. To this end, children aged 8 to 10 years, adolescents aged 13 to 15 years, and adults aged 20 to 35 years took part in the experiment.
Participants were asked to open a “magical” drawer using exactly the right initial speed. Only when they applied the correct speed could the drawer be fully opened, revealing a gold coin as a reward. If the movement was too fast or too slow, the drawer stopped just before reaching the goal.
During the task, we recorded brain activity using EEG. We focused on two key time points: first, internal error processing that is, the moment participants themselves detected whether their movement was correct; and second, the processing of external feedback, namely when the drawer either opened successfully or stopped.
Our results show that even children aged 8 to 10 are able to detect deviations from the target speed as errors, indicating that they already possess internal error-processing mechanisms. All age groups also responded to external feedback. Interestingly, however, more complex brain processing following external feedback was most pronounced in adolescents. Over the course of the experiment, all participants improved their performance, although adults were overall slightly more successful than children.
Overall, the findings suggest that by around the age of eight, children are already capable of monitoring their movements internally and using feedback to support learning.

You’ll find a preliminary version of the publication here: 
Faßbender, L., Maurer, L.K., Falck, J., Shing, Y.L. & Schwarzer, G. (2026). Developmental Perspective on Neural Mechanisms of Error Processing During Motor Learning. PsyArxiv, preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jrcmw_v2

Our current study is about how 6 to 7-year-old children plan actions in social situations. More specifically, we want to find out how children grab tools in different situations in order to hand them over to another person. To do this, we want children to use different tools (e.g., a magnetic wand) to either perform different tasks themselves (e.g., retrieve metal balls from a basket) or to pass the tools to another person. We are interested in the grasping strategies that children use under these two conditions.

In addition, we want to investigate the extent to which children's performance in the grasping task is related to two cognitive processes, namely social cognition (thinking about other people's thoughts and intentions) and spatial perspective-taking.

We capture children's "social cognition" by asking them about what other people are thinking in certain situations. We measure perspective-taking ability by asking children to replicate another person's perspective on an object.

The study is currently in the survey stage and has not yet been completed.

     Motor adaptation to the change of a task typical for everyday life