Tune to touch: Affective touch enhances learning of face identity in 4-month-old infants

Abstract

Touch provides more than sensory input for discrimination of what is on the skin. From early in development it has a rewarding and motivational value, which may reflect an evolutionary mechanism that promotes learning and affiliative bonding. In the present study we investigated whether affective touch helps infants tune to social signals, such as faces. Four-month-old infants were habituated to an individual face with averted gaze, which typically does not engage infants to the same extent as direct gaze does. As in a previous study, in the absence of touch, infants did not learn the identity of this face. Critically, 4-month-old infants did learn to discriminate this face when parents provided gentle stroking, but they did not when they experienced a non-social tactile stimulation. A preliminary follow-up eye-tracking study (Supplementary material) revealed no significant difference in the visual scanning of faces between touch and no-touch conditions, suggesting that affective touch may not affect the distribution of visual attention, but that it may promote more efficient learning of facial information.

Social Origins of Cortical Face Areas

“…At the same age, human infants also orient preferentially to another cue of a social interactions: their own name [66]. Social touch can also enhance human infants' attention to faces [67].…”

What Do Young Infants Do During Eye-Tracking Experiments? IP-BET – A Coding Scheme for Quantifying Spontaneous Infant and Parent Behaviour

“…Moreover, specific interactive behaviours that occur while the infant attends to a stimulus may modulate learning or create an ongoing communicative context that is associated with learning. Parental affective touch during face-to-face interactions facilitates looking at the parent (Provenzi et al, 2020), but in a visual perception task it enhances discrimination of novel faces in 4-month-olds (Della Longa et al, 2019). Meanwhile, looking at the parent may serve as a better measure of learning in a violation of expectation task than looking at the screen itself (Dunn and Bremner, 2017).…”

The role of caregiver touch in early neurodevelopment and parent-infant interactional synchrony

“…Children who receive more frequent maternal touch during play show a greater social orientation, or relative interest in faces compared with other objects (Reece et al, 2016). Finally, gentle caregiver stroking -but not other forms of touch -enables 4-monthold infants to recognize faces with an averted gaze, though they typically attend only to faces with a direct gaze (Della Longa et al, 2019). These changes may be mediated by the maturation of the social brain, as frequent maternal touch is associated with greater activity and connectivity of cortical regions implicated in social processing (Brauer et al, 2016).…”