Abstract
The sense of touch provides fundamental information about the surrounding world, and feedback about our own actions. Although touch is very important during the earliest stages of life, to date no study has investigated infants’ abilities to process visual stimuli implying touch. This study explores the developmental origins of the ability to visually recognize touching gestures involving others. Looking times and orienting responses were measured in a visual preference task, in which participants were simultaneously presented with two videos depicting a touching and a no-touching gesture involving human body parts (face, hand) and/or an object (spoon). In Experiment 1, 2-day-old newborns and 3-month-old infants viewed two videos: in one video a moving hand touched a static face, in the other the moving hand stopped before touching it. Results showed that only 3-month-olds, but not newborns, differentiated the touching from the no-touching gesture, displaying a preference for the former over the latter. To test whether newborns could manifest a preferential visual response when the touched body part is different from the face, in Experiment 2 newborns were presented with touching/no-touching gestures in which a hand or an inanimate object—i.e., a spoon- moved towards a static hand. Newborns were able to discriminate a hand-to-hand touching gesture, but they did not manifest any preference for the object-to-hand touch. The present findings speak in favour of an early ability to visually recognize touching gestures involving the interaction between human body parts.
Highlights
In our daily interactions with the animate and the inanimate world, we observe touch in many situations and we attribute to it communicative and affective meanings
It is clear that young infants detect goal-directed hand gestures, it is still unknown whether and at which stage of development they can visually recognize hand gestures depicting touch. By touching their own face during prenatal life infants gain a great deal of somatosensorymotor experience, which might bootstrap visual discrimination between touching and notouching gestures from the earliest stages of postnatal life. We have addressed this issue in two experiments using a visual preference task in which two dynamic images depicting a touching gesture and a no-touching gesture involving a face, a hand or an object were presented; looking times and orienting responses were measured
With the aim of disentangling between these different interpretations, in Experiment 2 we investigated newborns’ ability to discriminate between touching/no-touching gestures when the tactile events are directed towards a body part other than the face
Summary
In our daily interactions with the animate and the inanimate world, we observe touch in many situations and we attribute to it communicative and affective meanings. Touch is the first to develop in utero and represents a primary means of learning and exploring the environment from fetal life throughout infancy [1]. It is commonly recognized that touch is very important early in life [2, 3], we know very little about how infants visually perceive others being touched. No study has investigated infants’ ability to visually distinguish between touching and no-touching gestures. Visual processing of touch has been extensively investigated in adults [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
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