A Naturalistic Observation of Spontaneous Touches to the Body and Environment in the First 2 Months of Life

Abstract

Self-generated touches to the body or supporting surface are considered important contributors to the emergence of an early sense of the body and self in infancy. Both are critical for the formation of later goal-directed actions. Very few studies have examined in detail the development of these early spontaneous touches during the first months of life. In this study, we followed weekly four infants in two naturalistic 5-min sessions (baseline and toys-in-view) as they laid alert in supine from the age of 3 weeks until they acquired head control. We found that throughout the 2 months of observation, infants engaged in a high rate of touch and spent about 50% of the time moving their hands from one touch location to the next. On most sessions, they produced up to 200 body/surface contacts and touched as many as 18 different areas (mainly upper body and floor) both hands combined. When we did not consider the specific areas touched, the rates of touches were higher to the body than to the floor, but the duration of contacts and the most touched areas were higher for the supporting surface than for the body. Until the age of 9 weeks, we found no consistent differences in the rate of touch between head and trunk. Infants also did not display significant differences in their rate of touch between right and left hand or between conditions. However, we discovered that in the earlier weeks, infants engaged more often in what we called “complex touches.” Complex touches were touches performed across several body/floor areas in one continuous bout while the hand maintained contact with the body or floor. Single touches, in contrast, corresponded to one touch to one single body or floor area at a time. We suggest that infants are active explorers of their own body and peripersonal space from day 1 and that these early self-generated and deeply embodied sensorimotor experiences form the critical foundation from which future behaviors develop.

Most self-touches are with the nondominant hand

“…if a person touches the right side of their face, they most likely have used their right hand to do so. And this is also shown by newborns 23 .…”

Using network analysis to capture developmental change: An illustration from infants’ postural transitions

“…In the current paper, we illustrated how network analytic tools, typically used in the context of understanding social relations between individuals, can be extended to detect patterns of the interdependencies within an individuals’ movement behaviors or states (see also DiMercurio et al, 2018). Thus, network analysis can potentially support researchers in exploring research questions that have not been investigated using existing methods.…”

“…Beyond Dimercurio et al’s (2018) study, we are not aware of other uses of network analysis in developmental research that are aimed at capturing changes and transitions in a network of behaviors within individuals. In this paper, we aim to provide another example of how network analysis can be expanded from its traditional use, that is, understanding interconnections between individual members of a group, to examining behavioral transition patterns within a single individual's behavioral repertoire over time.…”

“…Rather than conceptualizing a network as a set of connections between individuals , a recent study has used network analysis to find relationships and transitions between different behaviors or states produced by single individuals. DiMercurio et al (2018) recently used network analysis to examine self‐touch behaviors in infants from about 3–13 weeks of age. Using a network map of infant body areas (where the body areas were the nodes), the researchers examined network density and centrality of each infant's self‐touch behaviors over time.…”

Développement du savoir-faire corporel durant la première année de vie du bébé

“…For example, Rochat and Hespos (1997) observed that newborns did not show the "rooting reflex" (a reflexive movement of the head in response to a caress on the cheek) when the tactile stimulation applied to their cheek was caused by contact with their own hand, whereas they did when tactile stimulation was applied by an experimenter. Over the first six months of life, spontaneous tactile exploration of the body evolves, from movements directed toward the top half of the body (face and trunk) with the outside of the hand, to movements directed toward the bottom half of the body (legs and feet), with the palm of the hand and then with grasping (Thomas et al, 2015;DiMercurio et al, 2018).…”