In this study we asked healthy young adult participants to find a phone in a range of rooms in virtual reality under simulated visual impairment in the periphery of their visual field. We applied various levels of blur to periphery of the image shown to the left and/or right eye by the VR headset to assess the effect of an asymmetrical impairment on visual search. The main aim was to test whether participants' search times are solely affected by vision in the worse eye, or whether impairments to the better eye also have measurable impact on search times (to test the, and to explore how people compensate for their vision loss by making more eye and head movements.In playgrounds, traffic and around the house, we are at continuous risk of bodily injury. Children are particularly accident-prone, as reflected in the disproportionally high accident-rates of pedestrians aged 15 year and younger. In recent years many researchers, including myself, have made considerable strides in understanding how visuomotor abilities improve across development. Despite these advances in understanding, current approaches do not consider how children adjust for their changing abilities to avoid unnecessary bodily risk during everyday visuomotor decisions. For example, children are less efficient than adults at avoiding incoming traffic when crossing busy roads. Do they account for this correctly by waiting for larger gaps between cars before crossing? Economic decision-making theories will be employed to model children's visuomotor choices. Economists identify the best financial investments by trading-off probabilities of positive and negative monetary outcomes. Likewise, such tactics can identify the best movement strategy (e.g., when to cross) that maximises safety and efficiency (e.g., avoids accidents but utilises safe gaps in traffic). This has proven very effective for modelling mature visuomotor behaviour, showing that adults often choose movements that optimise performance. Recently I pioneered this approach with children, showing that children aged 6 to 11 years make riskier visuomotor choices than adults during manual reaching. To understand and reduce the effects of risky action selection on childhood injury, we must characterise more broadly how visuomotor decision-making develops, and understand which neurocognitive processes drive this change. A combination of precise behavioural tests, mathematical modelling and neuroimaging will be used to address these fundamental questions. This proposal consists of 3 main objectives that each form a necessary step towards understanding children's movements under real risk in real world situations; These are to (1) characterise children's risky visuomotor decisions in realistic circumstances, including whole-body movements and poor eye-sight, (2) identify which basic mental processes underlie children's immature visuomotor choices, and (3) investigate how these might be improved through training. By characterising changes in visuomotor decision-making in detail at the behavioural and neural level, these objectives will significantly advance our understanding of the developing visuomotor system in action and the mechanisms of visuomotor decision-making. Moreover, this project has great translational potential for improving childhood safety and well being in everyday life, by informing educational programs and generating new ideas for interventions to improve safety.

We recruited 13 young adult human participants with (corrected to) normal vision and no known neural abnormalities, from an online study registration platform at the university. Participants were able to sign up for the study themselves and mainly included university students, so it was therefore an opportunity sample. In the experiment participants were wearing a VR headset with eye-tracker built in, calibrated to the participants ocular properties. Participants were "spawned" into a particular location in a room in a virtual house built in the VR engine Unity, where they were asked to find a mobile phone located somewhere in the room. We used custom software to blur the periphery of the images of the room rendered on the VR display at 5 different levels ranging from zero blur to maximum blur. We manipulated blur of the left and right eye separately, and measured the effect of this asymmetry on visual search time. Each person underwent 250 phone searching trials (5 blur level left eye, 5 blur levels right eye, 10 trials each).