Detection of visual–tactile contingency in the first year after birth

Children’s Responses to the Rubber-Hand Illusion Reveal Dissociable Pathways in Body Representation

“…The perceived position of the participant's own hand was shifted towards the fake hand, while participants experienced a referral of touch to the fake hand and sense of ownership over it. These effects were apparent from pointing measures, questionnaire data, and spontaneous reactions (comments such as: "That feels like (Zmyj et al, 2011). Second, irrespective of visual-tactile cues, felt hand position was further towards the fake hand than for children than for adults.…”

“…While it is clear that both multisensory bodily perception (Bremner, Holmes, & Spence, 2012;Rochat, 1998;Zmyj, Jank, Schütz-Bosbach, & Daum, 2011) and the sense of self (e.g. Lewis, 2011;Rochat, 2010;Slaughter & Brownell, 2011) develop in infancy and early childhood, there has been little investigation of the relationship between these processes.…”

The development of multisensory body representation and awareness continues to 10years of age: Evidence from the rubber hand illusion

“…Results from Cowie et al (2013) show a robust use of synchronous visual-tactile information by four years, but there are recent suggestions that this is present in infancy (Zmyj et al, 2011) and even in neonates (Filippetti et al, 2013). It has also been argued that infants have an awareness of own-body form early in the first year of life (Morgan & Rochat, 1997;Zmyj et al, 2011;Filippetti et al, 2013).…”

“…For example, 5 month old infants are sensitive to visual-proprioceptive congruency (seeing a limb move at the same time as you feel it move): they preferentially attend to nonsynchronous movement over synchronous (Bahrick & Watson, 1985). Likewise, very young infants detect visualtactile synchrony between brush strokes applied to a viewed body, and strokes applied to their own face (Filipetti, Johnson, Lloyd-Fox, Dragovic & Farroni, 2013) or limbs (Zmyj, Jank, Schütz-Bosbach & Daum, 2011). These sensitivities reflect infants' early abilities to detect common properties of stimuli -in this case, temporal and spatial properties of stimulation across the senses -what has been referred to in the literature as amodal perception (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2012).…”

“…They are no longer sensitive to visual-tactile synchrony on the face when the visual face which they are inspecting is inverted. Similarly, they are no longer sensitive to visual-proprioceptive synchrony (Morgan & Rochat, 1997) or visual-tactile synchrony (Zmyj et al, 2011) when the form of the legs is changed. Thus, both multisensory and unisensory featural cues seem to be used by infants in processing information about their own bodies.…”