Developmental origins of bodily awareness

Abstract

The question of how we come to perceive our own bodies has not received the attention it deserves in developmental psychology, particularly given the fundamental roles which body representations play in skilled action and self-awareness. In this chapter, I briefly discuss some of the theoretical accounts of the development of body representations before considering a number of sources of evidence which speak to the development of body representations in early life. Contrary to a number of accounts which have it that newborn humans are provided with innate (components) of body representations (e.g., Gallagher, 2006; Rochat, 2010), I argue that many documented abilities to perceive the body in early life represent small pieces of a much larger puzzle, and that the evidence, where it exists, indicates that that postnatal infants’ early perceptions of their own bodies are fragmented and incomplete: fully fledged abilities to represent our own bodies take significant developmental time to emerge, likely as a result of experience. Finally, I consider how the extended development of some aspects of bodily awareness might impact upon emerging self-awareness, and influenced by recent theoretical accounts of the early development of social cognition (Southgate, 2020), I ask whether the absence of well-elaborated body representations in early life may bestow some early advantages in early social cognitive development.