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Updated: Jul 17, 2025
Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
Published on: May 15, 2019
Infants' representations of the infant body in the first year of life: a preferential looking time study
Silvia Rigato1, Maria Laura Filippetti2, Carina de Klerk2
1Centre for Brain Science, Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK. srigato@essex.ac.uk.
Insights
Infants do not appear to have innate expectations about typical infant body proportions. Further visual experience with infant bodies may be needed for developing these body representations.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Human Body Perception
Background:
- Understanding how infants develop body representations is crucial for cognitive development.
- Prior research indicates infants form expectations about adult body structures based on visual exposure.
- The developmental trajectory of infant body part proportion expectations remains unexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether infants aged 5-14 months possess expectations regarding the relative sizes of infant body parts.
- To examine if infants show preferential looking towards typical versus proportionally distorted infant bodies.
- To assess the influence of locomotor abilities on infant body proportion perception.
Main Methods:
- A preferential looking paradigm was employed with three age groups of infants (5-14 months).
- Infants viewed images of typical and proportionally distorted infant bodies in upright and inverted orientations.
- Infants' looking behavior was recorded, and their locomotor skills were assessed.
Main Results:
- Infants across all age groups looked equally at typical and proportionally distorted infant bodies.
- Looking behavior did not differ between upright and inverted body presentations.
- Infants' looking patterns were independent of their developmental stage in locomotor abilities.
Conclusions:
- Infants may require more extensive visual experience with infant bodies to form expectations about typical proportions.
- Current findings suggest that body representation development is influenced by specific visual exposure to age-appropriate body types.
- The study highlights the need for further research into the sensory and experiential factors shaping early body perception.
Abstract:
Representing others' bodies is of fundamental importance for interacting with our environment, yet little is known about how body representations develop. Previous research suggests that infants have expectations about the typical structure of human bodies from relatively early in life, but that these expectations are dependent on how closely the stimuli resemble the bodies infants are exposed to in daily life. Yet, all previous studies used images of adult human bodies, and therefore it is unknown whether infants' representations of infant bodies follow a similar developmental trajectory. In this study we investigated whether infants have expectations about the relative size of infant body parts in a preferential looking study using typical and disproportional infant bodies. We recorded the looking behaviour of three groups of infants between 5 and 14 months of age while they watched images of upright and inverted infant bodies, typical and proportionally distorted, and also collected data on participants' locomotor abilities. Our results showed that infants of all ages looked equally at the typical and proportionally distorted infant body stimuli in both the upright and inverted conditions, and that their looking behaviour was unrelated to their locomotor skills. These findings suggest that infants may need additional visual experience with infant bodies to develop expectations about their typical proportions.
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