Five‐Month‐old Infants' Discrimination of Visual–Tactile Synchronous Facial Stimulation

Abstract

The distinction between self and other is crucial for self‐awareness and for our awareness of others. However, how human beings learn to associate the face they see in the mirror with themselves is still a matter of debate. The exploration of body‐related multisensory processing with infants has demonstrated that they can detect visual‐tactile contingencies, suggesting the presence of early implicit body perception simply based on the spatiotemporal matching between visual and tactile stimuli alone. In the present study, we used facial stimuli to investigate 5‐month‐old infants' visual preference for visual‐tactile temporal synchrony. Infants watched a side‐by‐side video display of a peer's face being systematically stroked on the cheek with a paintbrush. During the video presentation, the infant's own cheek was stroked in synchrony with one video and in asynchrony with the other. Our result demonstrates that 5‐month‐old infants are able to discriminate between visual‐tactile synchrony and asynchrony, by showing a visual preference for the synchronous facial stimulus. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Self or (M)other? Infants’ Sensitivity to Bodily Overlap With Their Mother Reflects Their Dyadic Coordination

“…Another possibility is that infants found the stranger so novel that they attended to processing the identity of her face at the expense of attending to differences in stimuli synchronicity. Although we cannot exclude this possibility based on the current data, it seems unlikely, because participants in similar tasks discriminated between two videos of an unfamiliar infant's face on the basis of synchronicity (Filippetti et al, 2013(Filippetti et al, , 2016. However, wariness of strangers is known to increase around this age (Sroufe, 1977), and future work can address this explanation by adding a condition with a familiarized stranger, such as a researcher who interacts with the infant before the experiment.…”

“…We chose this age because infants have been shown to prefer synchrony to asynchrony in visual-tactile tasks at 5, 7, and 10 months of age (Filippetti et al, 2016;Zmyj et al, 2011) and because of the abundance of research into face-to-face parent-infant interactions in the second half of the first year (Feldman, 2007). We based a priori sample size on effect sizes calculated from published data for visual-tactile synchrony effects in newborns (Filippetti et al, 2013) and 5-month-olds (Filippetti et al, 2016). A sample of 16 yields 95% power to detect a medium effect size of 0.5 in a 2 9 2 within-participants design, according to GPower (version 3.1.9.2; Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007).…”

Synchrony of Caresses: Does Affective Touch Help Infants to Detect Body-Related Visual–Tactile Synchrony?

“…Then, a synchronous preference score was calculated considering the looking time to the synchronous video over the total looking time to the screen. This score was calculated on the looking time instead of the total time of stimulus presentation (12 s for each trial) in order to take into account the effective interest of the infant during each trial (Turati et al, 2005;Filippetti et al, 2016). The same experimenter coded all the videos using the Datavyu software, a video coding and data visualization tool for collecting behavioral data from video (Datavyu Team, 2014).…”

“…Considering the neurophysiological characteristics of affective touch and evidence from adult research (Crucianelli et al, 2013;van Stralen et al, 2014;Panagiotopoulou et al, 2017), in the present study we aimed to investigate whether affective touch may promote implicit bodily self-awareness in early infancy, by facilitating the detection of body-related visual-tactile contingencies. More specifically, we built on a previous visual preference paradigm developed by Filippetti et al (2016). In this study, 5-month-old infants were presented with two sideby-side videos of a baby's face being stroked on the cheek.…”

Just Before I Recognize Myself: The Role of Featural and Multisensory Cues Leading up to Explicit Mirror Self‐Recognition

“…Developmentally, a large set of studies have indeed demonstrated infants' early abilities to discriminate visual‐proprioceptive contingency arising from their own movements (Bahrick & Watson, ; Morgan & Rochat, ; Reddy, Chisholm, Forrester, Conforti, & Maniatopoulou, ; Rochat & Morgan, ; Schmuckler & Jewell, ; Watson, ), as well as perfectly synchronous multisensory cues related to the body (Filippetti, Farroni, & Johnson, ; Filippetti, Johnson, Lloyd‐Fox, Dragovic, & Farroni, ; Zmyj, Jank, Schütz‐Bosbach, & Daum, ). However, while these studies show that multisensory contingency becomes functional quite early in life, the ability to discriminate this information does not necessarily imply that the infant is able to recognize these movements and body parts as belonging to the self (Bremner, Holmes, & Spence, ; Lewis & Brooks‐Gunn, ).…”