Seeing Touches Early in Life

Abstract

The sense of touch provides fundamental information about the surrounding world, and feedback about our own actions. Although touch is very important during the earliest stages of life, to date no study has investigated infants' abilities to process visual stimuli implying touch. This study explores the developmental origins of the ability to visually recognize touching gestures involving others. Looking times and orienting responses were measured in a visual preference task, in which participants were simultaneously presented with two videos depicting a touching and a no-touching gesture involving human body parts (face, hand) and/or an object (spoon). In Experiment 1, 2-day-old newborns and 3-month-old infants viewed two videos: in one video a moving hand touched a static face, in the other the moving hand stopped before touching it. Results showed that only 3-month-olds, but not newborns, differentiated the touching from the no-touching gesture, displaying a preference for the former over the latter. To test whether newborns could manifest a preferential visual response when the touched body part is different from the face, in Experiment 2 newborns were presented with touching/no-touching gestures in which a hand or an inanimate object-i.e., a spoon- moved towards a static hand. Newborns were able to discriminate a hand-to-hand touching gesture, but they did not manifest any preference for the object-to-hand touch. The present findings speak in favour of an early ability to visually recognize touching gestures involving the interaction between human body parts.

Fig 1. Stimuli and results of Experiment 1.

(a) Frames composing the hand-to-face touching gesture (left) and the no-touching gesture (right) videos. Frames are presented in succession in the direction indicated by the arrow. The two stimuli were presented simultaneously on the screen (b) Newborns’ total looking times (left) and orienting responses (right) towards the touching and no-touching gesture during trial 1 and 2. (c) 3-month-old infants’ total looking times (left) and orienting responses (right) towards the touching and no-touching gesture during trial 1 and 2. Error bars refer to the standard errors of the mean. * = p < .05

Fig 2. Stimuli and results of Experiment 2.

(a) Stimuli and results of the social condition. (a1) Frames composing the hand-to-hand touching gesture (left) and the no-touching gesture (right) videos. Frames are presented in succession in the direction indicated by the arrow. The two stimuli were presented simultaneously on the screen (a2) Newborns’ total looking times (left) and orienting responses (right) towards the touching and no-touching gesture during trial 1 and 2 in the social condition. (b) Stimuli and results of the Non-social condition. (b1) Frames composing the object-to-hand touching gesture (left) and the no-touching gesture (right) videos. (b2) Newborns’ total looking times (left) and orienting responses (right) towards the touching and no-touching gesture during trial 1 and 2 in the Non-social condition. Error bars refer to the standard errors of the mean. * = p < .05