This longitudinal study investigated the effect of experience with tactile stimulation on infants' ability to reach to targets on the body, an important adaptive skill. Infants were provided weekly tactile stimulation on eight body locations from 4 to 8 months of age (N = 11), comparing their ability to reach to the body to infants in a control group who did not receive stimulation (N = 10). Infants who received stimulation were more likely to successfully reach targets on the body than controls by 7 months of age. These findings indicate that tactile stimulation facilitates the development of reaching to the body by allowing infants to explore the sensorimotor correlations emerging from the stimulation.

Department of Cybernetics Faculty of Electrical Engineering Czech Technical University Prague Prague Czech Republic

Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience University of Salzburg Salzburg Austria

Department of Psychology Tulane University New Orleans Louisiana USA

Department of Psychology University of Portsmouth Portsmouth United Kingdom

Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center CNRS UMR 8002 Université Paris Cité Paris France

Texas Institute for Measurement Evaluation and Statistics University of Houston Houston Texas USA

ULR 4072 PSITEC Psychologie Interactions Temps Emotions Cognition University of Lille Lille France

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Bahrick, L. E. (1995). Intermodal origins of self-perception. In P. Rochat (Ed.), The self in infancy: Theory and research (pp. 349-373). North-Holland-Elsevier Science.

Bahrick, L. E., & Watson, J. S. (1985). Detection of intermodal proprioceptive-visual contingency as a potential basis of self-perception in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 21, 963-973. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.21.6.963

Bates, D., Machler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67, 1-48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01

Begum Ali, J., Spence, C., & Bremner, A. J. (2015). Human infants' ability to perceive touch in external space develops postnatally. Current Biology, 25, 978-979. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.055

Begum Ali, J., Thomas, R. L., Mullen Raymond, S., & Bremner, A. J. (2021). Sensitivity to visual-tactile colocation on the body prior to skilled reaching in early infancy. Child Development, 92, 21-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13428

Bushnell, E. W., & Boudreau, J. P. (1993). Motor development and the mind: The potential role of motor abilities as a determinant of aspects of perceptual development. Child Development, 64, 1005-1021. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1993.tb04184.x

Carvalho, R. P., Tudella, E., Caljouw, S. R., & Savelsbergh, G. J. (2008). Early control of reaching: Effects of experience and body orientation. Infant Behavior and Development, 31, 23-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2007.06.001

Chinn, L. K., Hoffmann, M., Leed, J. E., & Lockman, J. J. (2019). Reaching with one arm to the other: Coordinating touch, proprioception, and action during infancy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 183, 19-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.01.014

Chinn, L. K., Noonan, C. F., Hoffmann, M., & Lockman, J. J. (2019). Development of infant reaching strategies to tactile targets on the face. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00009

Chinn, L. K., Noonan, C. F., & Lockman, J. J. (2021). The human face becomes mapped as a sensorimotor reaching space during the first year. Child Development, 92, 760-773. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13405

Clifton, R. K., Muir, D. W., Ashmead, D. H., & Clarkson, M. G. (1993). Is visually guided reaching in early infancy a myth? Child Development, 64, 1099-1110. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131328

Corbetta, D., Thurman, S. L., Wiener, R. F., Guan, Y., & Williams, J. L. (2014). Mapping the feel of the arm with the sight of the object: On the embodied origins of infant reaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 576. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00576

DiMercurio, A., Connell, J. P., Clark, M., & Corbetta, D. (2018). A naturalistic observation of spontaneous touches to the body and environment in the first 2 months of life. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2613. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02613

Fagard, J. (1998). Changes in grasping skills and the emergence of bimanual coordination during the first year of life. In K. J. Connolly (Ed.), The psychobiology of the hand (pp. 123-143). Mac Keith Press.

Filippetti, M. L., Orioli, G., Johnson, M. H., & Farroni, T. (2015). Newborn body perception: Sensitivity to spatial congruency. Infancy, 20, 455-465. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12083

Heed, T., Buchholz, V. N., Engel, A. K., & Röder, B. (2015). Tactile remapping: From coordinate transformation to integration in sensorimotor processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 251-258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.03.001

Hoffmann, M., Chinn, L., Somogyi, E., Heed, T., Fagard, J., Lockman, J. J., & O'Regan, J. K. (2017). Development of reaching to the body in early infancy: From experiments to robotic models. In 2017 joint IEEE international conference on development and learning and epigenetic robotics (pp. 112-119). IEEE ICDL-EpiRob Proceedings Series. https://doi.org/10.1109/DEVLRN.2017.8329795

Hopkins, B., & Rönnqvist, L. (2002). Facilitating postural control: Effects on the reaching behavior of 6-month-old infants. Developmental Psychobiology, 40, 168-182. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.10021

Leed, J. E., Chinn, L. K., & Lockman, J. J. (2019). Reaching to the self: The development of infants' ability to localize targets on the body. Psychological Science, 30, 1063-1073. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619850168

Lew, A. R., & Butterworth, G. (1997). The development of hand-mouth coordination in 2- to 5-month-old infants: Similarities with reaching and grasping. Infant Behavior and Development, 20, 59-69. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-6383(97)90061-8

Marshall, P. J., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2015). Body maps in the infant brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 499-505. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.06.012

Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198, 74-78. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.198.4312.75

Myowa-Yamakoshi, M., & Takeshita, H. (2006). Do human fetuses anticipate self-oriented actions? A study by four-dimensional (4D) ultrasonography. Infancy, 10, 289-301. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327078in1003_5

Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children (M. Cook, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Co. https://doi.org/10.1037/11494-000

R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/

Reissland, N., & Austen, J. (2018). Goal directed behaviours: The development of pre-natal touch behaviours. In D. Corbetta & M. Santello (Eds.), Reach-to-grasp behavior: Brain, behavior, and modelling across the life span (pp. 3-17). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429467875-1

Rigato, S., Begum Ali, J., van Velzen, J., & Bremner, A. J. (2014). The neural basis of somatosensory remapping develops in human infancy. Current Biology: CB, 24(11), 1222-1226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.004

Rochat, P. (1993). Hand-mouth coordination in the newborn: Morphology, determinants, and early development of a basic act. In G. J. P. Savelsbergh (Ed.), The development of coordination in infancy (pp. 265-288). Elsevier Science Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4115(08)60956-5

Rochat, P. (1998). Self-perception and action in infancy. Experimental Brain Research, 123, 102-109. https://doi.org/10.1007/s002210050550

Rochat, P., & Hespos, S. J. (2002). Differential rooting response by neonates: Evidence for an early sense of self. Early Development and Parenting, 6, 105-112. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-0917(199709/12)6:3/4<105::aid-edp150>3.3.co;2-l

Russel, L., Buerkner, P., Herve, M., Love, J., Riebl, H., & Singmann, H. (2021). emmeans: Estimated marginal means, aka least-squares means. R Package Version. 1.5. 2-1.

Somogyi, E., Jacquey, L., Heed, T., Hoffmann, M., Lockman, J. J., Granjon, L., Fagard, J., & O'Regan, J. K. (2018). Which limb is it? Responses to vibrotactile stimulation in early infancy. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 36, 384-401. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12224

Thelen, E., Corbetta, D., Kamm, K., Spencer, J. P., Schneider, K., & Zernicke, R. F. (1993). The transition to reaching: Mapping intention and intrinsic dynamics. Child Development, 64, 1058-1098. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131327

Thomas, B. L., Karl, J. M., & Whishaw, I. Q. (2014). Independent development of the reach and the grasp in spontaneous self-touching by human infants in the first 6 months. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1526. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01526

Wallon, H. (1941). L'évolution psychologique de L'enfant. Armand Colin.

Williams, J. L., Corbetta, D., & Cobb, L. (2015). How perception, action, functional value, and context can shape the development of infant reaching. Movement & Sport Sciences-Science & Motricité, 89, 5-15. https://doi.org/10.1051/sm/2015005

Zoia, S., Blason, L., D'Ottavio, G., Bulgheroni, M., Pezzetta, E., Scabar, A., & Castiello, U. (2007). Evidence of early development of action planning in the human foetus: A kinematic study. Experimental Brain Research, 176, 217-226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-006-0607-3