Discrimination of Biomechanically Possible and Impossible Hand Movements at Birth (original) (raw)
Related papers
Current Biology, 2013
Body ownership and awareness has recently become an active topic of research in adults using paradigms such as the ''rubber hand illusion '' and ''enfacement'' [1-11]. These studies show that visual, tactile, postural, and anatomical information all contribute to the sense of body ownership in adults . While some hypothesize body perception from birth [13], others have speculated on the importance of postnatal experience . Through studying body perception in newborns, we can directly investigate the factors involved prior to significant postnatal experience. To address this issue, we measured the looking behavior of newborns presented with visual-tactile synchronous and asynchronous cues, under conditions in which the visual information was either an upright (body-related stimulus; experiment 1) or inverted (non-body-related stimulus; experiment 2) infant face. We found that newborns preferred to look at the synchronous condition compared to the asynchronous condition, but only when the visual stimulus was body related. These results are in line with findings from adults and demonstrate that human newborns detect intersensory synchrony when related to their own bodies, consistent with the basic processes underlying body perception being present at birth.
Development of body knowledge as measured by arm differentiation in infants: from global to local?
The ability to perceive and use the body parts in an organised and differentiated manner is a precursor of body knowledge in infancy. To acquire this ability, the infant’s brain might explore the perceptual consequences of its bodily actions. Undifferentiated body movements would gradually be replaced by more precise actions. Only a very few papers have tested this “global-to-local” hypothesis and none of them have so far been replicated. In this study, we assessed arm differentiation in 4-, 6- and 8-month-old infants using a new contingency detection task in which infants have to detect a contingency between one of their arms’ activity and an audiovisual stimulus on a screen. We found that 4- to 8-month-old infants seem able to differentiate their arms. However, surprisingly, we were not able to show a developmental trend in arm differentiation between 4 and 8 months of age.
Strong biomechanical constraints on young children's mental imagery of hands
Royal Society open science, 2014
Mental rotation (MR) of body parts is a useful paradigm to investigate how people manipulate mental imagery related to body schema. It has been documented that adult participants use 'motor imagery' for MR of hands: a behavioural indication is a biomechanical effect, that is, hand pictures in orientations to which imitative hand movement would be biomechanically difficult require longer response times to be visually identified as the left or right hand. However, little is known about the typical developmental trajectory of the biomechanical effect, which could offer clues to understanding how children acquire the ability to manipulate body schema. This study investigated developmental changes in the biomechanical effect in schoolchildren. Eighty-four children (from 6 to 11 years old, grouped into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th graders) and fifteen adults made hand laterality judgements in an MR paradigm. The results indicated that the biomechanical effect is stronger for younger...
Mapping the feel of the arm with the sight of the object: on the embodied origins of infant reaching
Frontiers in psychology, 2014
For decades, the emergence and progression of infant reaching was assumed to be largely under the control of vision. More recently, however, the guiding role of vision in the emergence of reaching has been downplayed. Studies found that young infants can reach in the dark without seeing their hand and that corrections in infants' initial hand trajectories are not the result of visual guidance of the hand, but rather the product of poor movement speed calibration to the goal. As a result, it has been proposed that learning to reach is an embodied process requiring infants to explore proprioceptively different movement solutions, before they can accurately map their actions onto the intended goal. Such an account, however, could still assume a preponderant (or prospective) role of vision, where the movement is being monitored with the scope of approximating a future goal-location defined visually. At reach onset, it is unknown if infants map their action onto their vision, vision onto their action, or both. To examine how infants learn to map the feel of their hand with the sight of the object, we tracked the object-directed looking behavior (via eye-tracking) of three infants followed weekly over an 11-week period throughout the transition to reaching. We also examined where they contacted the object. We find that with some objects, infants do not learn to align their reach to where they look, but rather learn to align their look to where they reach. We propose that the emergence of reaching is the product of a deeply embodied process, in which infants first learn how to direct their movement in space using proprioceptive and haptic feedback from self-produced movement contingencies with the environment. As they do so, they learn to map visual attention onto these bodily centered experiences, not the reverse. We suggest that this early visuo-motor mapping is critical for the formation of visually-elicited, prospective movement control.
Report Body Perception in Newborns
2013
Summary Body ownership and awareness has recently become an active topic of research in adults using paradigms such as the ‘‘rubber hand illusion’’ and ‘‘enfacement’’ [1–11]. These studies show that visual, tactile, postural, and anatomical information all contribute to the sense of body ownership in adults [12]. While some hypothesize body perception from birth [13], others have speculated on the importance of postnatal experience [14, 15]. Through studying body perception in newborns, we can directly investigate the factors involved prior to significant postnatal experience. To address this issue, we measured the looking behavior of newborns presented with visual-tactile synchronous and asynchronous cues, under conditions in which the visual information was either an upright (body-related stimulus; experiment 1) or inverted (non-body-related stimulus; experiment 2) infant face. We found that newborns preferred to look at the synchronous condition compared to the asynchronous condi...
Body Representation in the First Year of Life
Infancy, 2010
Like faces, bodies are significant sources of social information. However, research suggests that infants do not develop body representation (i.e., knowledge about typical human bodies) until the second year of life, although they are sensitive to facial information much earlier. Yet, previous research only examined whether infants are sensitive to the typical arrangement of body parts. We examined whether younger infants have body knowledge of a different kind, namely the relative size of body parts. Five-and 9-month-old infants were tested for their preference between a normal versus a proportionally distorted body. Nine-month-olds exhibited a preference for the normal body when images were presented upright but not when they were inverted. Fivemonth-olds failed to exhibit a preference in either condition. These results indicate that infants have knowledge about human bodies by the second half of the first year of life. Moreover, given that better performance on upright than on inverted stimuli has been tied to expertise, the fact that older infants exhibited an inversion effect with body images indicates that at least some level of expertise in body processing develops by 9 months of age. Humans' perception of faces is thought of as a specialized process, which profits both from a bias to attend to faces early in life as well as repeated exposure to faces (
Exploration of the newborn's manual activity: A window onto early cognitive processes
Infant Behavior & Development, 2005
Neuronal group selection theory (NGST) proposals . Biologie de la conscience. Paris: Odile Jacob] focusing on variability are used to aid the understanding of the close relation existing at birth between cognitive endowments and haptic manual functioning. We report a series of experiments providing evidence for a manual activity characterised at birth by its variability: the neonate cyclical manual activity alternating opening and closing of the hand is defined as a general exploratory movement pattern (GEMP) that newborns use as an exploratory tool. This GEMP is sufficiently variable to offer a huge diversity in the object properties explored. This diversity allows, in turn, a cognitive process of comparison allowing neonates to unify their multimodal perception.
Neonatal finger and arm movements as determined by a social and an object context
Early Development and Parenting, 1994
What kind of hand and finger movements are newborn infants preoccupied with, and how are these movements organized and controlled? These questions were studied in two experiments under three conditions: a social condition, in which the mother (in expt 1) or the experimenter (in expt 2) sat face to face with the infant; an object condition, in which a ball moving slowly and irregularly was , presented to the infant; and a baseline condition (in expt 1) without 1 ball or mother present. The size of the ball and the distance to it 1 was chosen so that it approximately corresponded to the visual angle of the head of the model. Twenty-six neonates participated in the study ranging from 2 to 6 days of age at the time of observation. All infants were in an alert, optimal awake state during the experiments. The infants' finger movements were scored fmm video recordings. The result revealed a large variety of relatively independent finger movements. It was found that finger movements differed both in quantity and quality between the three conditions. There were many more finger movements in the social condition than in the object and baseline conditions. In addition, there were relatively more transitional finger movements and flexions of the hand in the social condition, and relatively more thumb-index finger activity and extensions of the hand in the object condition. Finally, the arms were more often forward extended in the object condition than in the social condition. The results support the notion that neonates show different modes of functioning towards people and objects.
How our hands shape our minds: Six developmental pathways
2021
In the current, empirically grounded paper, we first explore the ways in which manual actions, that is actions performed with hands and arms such as reaching, grasping, and manipulating objects, shape the mind. Based on recent empirical research, we suggest six embodied developmental pathways which solve unique challenges faced by infants and children during development. I) Co-opted motor simulation allows action anticipation, II) interactive specialisation allows executive control to emerge from reaching and grasping. III) Active exploration and IV) error based-learning facilitate cognition and perception. Action based social interactions facilitate V) language development and VI) gesture comprehension. These pathways exemplify how manual actions and the underlying neural processes controlling actions are used by the infant to structure the world and develop cognitive capacities and learn from interactions with the physical and social world. Through an individual difference, correl...