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Cortical signatures of visual body representation develop in human infancy
Jiale Yang1, Natasa Ganea2, So Kanazawa3
1School of Psychology, Chukyo University, Nagoya, Japan. jiale.yang.ac@gmail.com.
Scientific Reports
|September 7, 2023
Summary
Eight-month-old infants show enhanced brain responses when seeing a hand stroked while also feeling it. This suggests developing bodily self-awareness in infants by tracking visual cortical responses.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Neuroscience
- Infant cognition
Background:
- Infant bodily awareness is difficult to study as they cannot verbally report experiences.
- Visual cortical responses, measurable in infants, are linked to awareness and attention in adults.
- Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) offer a promising method to assess infant bodily awareness.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the development of bodily self-awareness in human infants.
- To determine if synchronous visual and tactile stimulation of the hand influences visual cortical responses in infants.
- To explore the age-related changes in multisensory integration related to body perception.
Main Methods:
- Presented 4- and 8-month-old infants with flickering visual stimuli of a hand being stroked.
- Recorded steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) to measure brain responses.
- Administered synchronous tactile stroking to infants during some visual stimuli presentations.
Main Results:
- Eight-month-old infants showed enhanced SSVEP responses during synchronous visual and tactile hand stroking, unlike 4-month-olds.
- This enhancement was absent when the visual hand was in an incompatible posture or the video was body-irrelevant.
- Findings suggest 8-month-olds integrate visual and tactile body-related information.
Conclusions:
- The study provides novel insights into the early development of bodily self-awareness in the first year of life.
- Multisensory integration of body-related stimuli emerges in the first year.
- SSVEPs serve as a valuable tool for studying infant body awareness and self-perception development.
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