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Body Representation in the First Year of Life
Nicole Zieber1, Ramesh S Bhatt1, Angela Hayden1
1Psychology Department University of Kentucky.
Insights
Infants as young as 9 months show knowledge of typical human body proportions, preferring normal bodies over distorted ones. This suggests early development of body representation and processing expertise.
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.
Abstract:
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. Five-month-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.
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