Summary: Babies as young as four months old can sense how their bodies interact with the space around them, shedding light on early self-awareness development.
In the study, babies were shown a moving ball on a screen, accompanied by tactile sensations when the ball was closest to them. Brain activity measurements showed that infants as young as four months exhibited enhanced tactile brain activity when a touch was linked to an object moving toward them.
This discovery challenges conventional thinking about when self-awareness begins and how it develops.
Key Facts:
- Babies as young as four months old demonstrated heightened somatosensory brain activity when tactile sensations were associated with objects moving closer to them.
- The study suggests that even before babies learn to reach for objects, their multisensory brain is wired to understand how their bodies interact with the space around them, known as peripersonal space.
- Older babies at eight months old displayed surprise responses when tactile sensations were unexpected due to the visual direction of the moving object, indicating the development of more sophisticated spatial awareness.
Source: University of Birmingham
Babies as young as four months old can make sense of how their bodies interact with the space around them, according to new research from the University of Birmingham.
The findings, published today in Scientific Reports, shed new light on how self-awareness develops.
Experts from the Birmingham BabyLab showed babies a ball on a screen moving towards or away from them. When the ball was closest to them on the screen, the babies were presented with a ‘touch’ (a small vibration) on their hands, whilst their brain activity was being measured. The data collection for the study was conducted at Goldsmiths (University of London).
The researchers found that from just four months old, babies show enhanced somatosensory (tactile) brain activity when a touch is preceded by an object moving towards them.
Dr Giulia Orioli, Research Fellow in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, who led the study said: “Our findings indicate that even in the first few months of life, before babies have even learned to reach for objects, the multisensory brain is wired up to make links between what babies see and what they feel. This means they can sense the space around them and understand how their bodies interact with that space. This is sometimes referred to as peripersonal space.
“Of course, humans do this all the time as adults, using our combined senses to perceive where we are in space and making predictions about when we will touch an object or not. But now that we know that babies in the early stages of their development begin to show signs of this, it opens up questions about how much of these abilities are learnt, or innate.”
The researchers also explored how an unexpected ‘touch’ would affect some of the older babies in the study. They found that in babies aged eight months old when the touch on their hand was preceded by the ball on the screen moving away from them, the babies’ brain activity showed signs that they were surprised.
Andrew Bremner, Professor of Developmental Psychology, commented: “Seeing the older babies show surprise responses suggests that they had not expected the touch due to the visual direction the object was moving in. This indicates that as babies proceed through their first year of life, their brains construct a more sophisticated awareness of how their body exists in the space around them.”
Next, the researchers are hoping to follow up this study with younger and older participants. Research with adults can illuminate the kinds of brain activity which infants are developing towards. They are also hoping to be able to see if there are early signs of these “multisensory” abilities in newborn babies.
Dr Orioli concluded: “It is a challenge working with newborns, as they spend such a large portion of their time sleeping and eating, but we are starting to have some success working with this age group, and it is going to be fascinating to see if babies only a few days old have the foundations of a sense of their bodies in space. If so, it could be that we are looking at the origins of human consciousness.”
About this neurodevelopment research news
Author: Eleanor Hail
Source: University of Birmingham
Contact: Eleanor Hail – University of Birmingham
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Visual objects approaching the body modulate subsequent somatosensory processing at 4 months of age” by Giulia Orioli et al. Scientific Reports
Abstract
Visual objects approaching the body modulate subsequent somatosensory processing at 4 months of age
We asked whether, in the first year of life, the infant brain can support the dynamic crossmodal interactions between vision and somatosensation that are required to represent peripersonal space.
Infants aged 4 (n = 20, 9 female) and 8 (n = 20, 10 female) months were presented with a visual object that moved towards their body or receded away from it. This was presented in the bottom half of the screen and not fixated upon by the infants, who were instead focusing on an attention getter at the top of the screen. The visual moving object then disappeared and was followed by a vibrotactile stimulus occurring later in time and in a different location in space (on their hands).
The 4-month-olds’ somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) were enhanced when tactile stimuli were preceded by unattended approaching visual motion, demonstrating that the dynamic visual-somatosensory cortical interactions underpinning representations of the body and peripersonal space begin early in the first year of life.
Within the 8-month-olds’ sample, SEPs were increasingly enhanced by (unexpected) tactile stimuli following receding visual motion as age in days increased, demonstrating changes in the neural underpinnings of the representations of peripersonal space across the first year of life.
