Newborns’ early attuning to hand‐to‐mouth coordinated actions

Abstract

Already inside the womb, fetuses frequently bring their hands to the mouth, anticipating hand-to-mouth contact by opening the mouth. Here, we explored whether 2-dayold newborns discriminate between hand actions directed towards different targets of the face-that is, a thumb that reaches the mouth and a thumb that reaches the chin. Newborns looked longer towards the thumb-to-mouth compared to the thumbto-chin action only in the presence, and not absence, of anticipatory mouth opening movements, preceding the thumb arrival. Overall, our results show that newborns are sensitive to hand-to-face coordinated actions, being capable to discriminate between body-related actions directed towards different targets of the face, but only when a salient visual cue that anticipates the target of the action is present. The role of newborns' sensorimotor experience with hand-to-mouth gestures in driving this capacity is discussed.

Newborns' perception of approach and withdrawal from biological movement: A closeness story

“…While these results alone cannot be ascribed to an early social motivation, they delineate a predisposition toward specific kinds of motion, specifically others approaching or trajectories directed to one's peripersonal space. We believe that together with other early attentional and perceptual constraints (Addabbo et al, 2021(Addabbo et al, , 2022Di Giorgio et al, 2021), this early attunement might play a role in the establishment of the roots of human predisposition toward social signals. The present study's findings converge with the idea that we are attuned to what is close to us and that others play a crucial role in this closeness from the very beginning of life.…”