Body Structure Perception in Infancy

Abstract

Structural cues, such as the relative size and arrangement of parts, are key aspects of adults' representation of human bodies, and they are used to derive significant social information such as age, sex, and attractiveness. Prior studies have not clearly addressed young infants' sensitivity to these body characteristics. In the current experiments, 3.5‐month‐olds exhibited a preference between images of intact bodies versus those with parts in wrong locations. Infants also discriminated between intact bodies and those with distorted part proportions. In both cases, infants discriminated when images were presented upright but not when they were inverted. These results indicate that infants are sensitive to the arrangement and size of human body parts at least by 3.5 months of age. Thus, contrary to some prior reports, body representation early in life is developed enough to include structural information.

The whole picture: Holistic body posture recognition in infancy

“…Moreover, the discrimination between intact and scrambled/distorted bodies found by Zieber and colleagues (Zieber et al, 2010; Zieber et al, 2015) is not necessarily indicative of holistic processing. This is because, although infants may be sensitive to the relative size and location of body parts, they may still represent features individually and not process the body image as an integrated whole.…”

“…A few recent studies have suggested that infants have some knowledge about the structure and organization of human bodies. Zieber, Kangas, Hock, and Bhatt (2015) found that 3.5-month-old infants discriminate between proportional and distorted bodies and between typical and scrambled bodies (see also Zieber et al, 2010). Additionally, 6.5-month-olds match static body postures to emotions, indicating infants’ sensitivity to gestures (Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2014).…”

“…We utilized a familiarization–novelty preference procedure that has been used in several previous studies (e.g., Pascalis, de Haan, & Nelson, 2002; Scott & Monesson, 2009; Zieber et al, 2015). Each familiarization and test trial was preceded by an attention-getter in which alternating green and purple shapes appeared in the center of the monitor.…”

Body maps in the infant brain

“…Initial studies suggested that sensitivity to body structure in static images was not apparent until the second year of life [81]. However, recent behavioral work suggests that infants may be sensitive to disruptions in the configuration of the human body at significantly younger ages [82–84]. Accompanying these behavioral investigations is a small number of studies examining infant neural responses to experimentally manipulated disruptions in bodily representations in static and dynamic displays [85–88].…”

Further evidence of early development of attention to dynamic facial emotions: Reply to Grossmann and Jessen

“…In addition, inversion is thought to disrupt configural processing of faces and bodies (Bertin & Bhatt, 2004; Bhatt, Bertin, Hayden, & Reed, 2005; Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002; Missana & Grossmann, 2015; Zieber, Kangas, Hock, & Bhatt, 2015). For example, adults show general processing deficits for inverted faces and bodies, such as reduced accuracy in same–different judgment tasks, but not when tested with inverted images of houses (Reed et al, 2007) or scrambled bodies (Reed, Stone, Grubb, & McGoldrick, 2006).…”