Body Representation in the First Year of Life.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Human Perception

Background:

• Bodies, like faces, convey crucial social information.
• Infants are sensitive to facial cues early but are thought to develop body representation later in the second year of life.
• Prior research focused on body part arrangement, not proportional knowledge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if infants possess body knowledge regarding the relative size of body parts.
• To determine the age at which infants develop an understanding of typical human body proportions.

Main Methods:

• Five- and 9-month-old infants were presented with images of normal and proportionally distorted human bodies.
• Infant preference between the two body types was measured in upright and inverted conditions.

Main Results:

• Nine-month-old infants preferred normal bodies over distorted ones when images were upright, but not when inverted.
• Five-month-old infants did not show a significant preference in either condition.
• The observed inversion effect in 9-month-olds suggests developing expertise in body processing.

Conclusions:

• Infants demonstrate knowledge of human body proportions by the second half of their first year.
• Body representation and processing expertise begin developing earlier than previously thought, by at least 9 months of age.