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. 2016 Mar;10(1):45-52.
doi: 10.1111/cdep.12162. Epub 2016 Jan 7.

The Development of Body Structure Knowledge in Infancy

Ramesh S Bhatt  1 , Alyson Hock  1 , Hannah White  1 , Rachel Jubran  1 , Ashley Galati  2
Affiliations

The Development of Body Structure Knowledge in Infancy

Ramesh S Bhatt et al. Child Dev Perspect. 2016 Mar.

Abstract

Although we know much about the development of face processing, we know considerably less about the development of body knowledge-despite bodies also being significant sources of social information. One set of studies indicated that body structure knowledge is poor during the 1st year of life and spawned a model that posits that, unlike the development of face knowledge, which benefits from innate propensities and dedicated learning mechanisms, the development of body knowledge relies on general learning mechanisms and develops slowly. In this article, we review studies on infants' knowledge about the structure of bodies and their processing of gender and emotion that paint a different picture. Although questions remain, a general social cognition system likely engenders similar trajectories of development of knowledge about faces and bodies, and may equip developing infants with the capacity to obtain socially critical information from many sources.

Keywords: body structure perception; development of body knowledge; infant social development; social cognition.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Examples of intact and part reorganized stimuli (top part). Preference was tested by presenting a stimulus of each kind side-by-side. Separate groups of infants were tested with upright and inverted stimuli. Three-and-a-half-month-olds preferred the reorganized images in the upright condition but not in the inverted condition (bottom part).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Examples of whole body, part, and scrambled test stimuli (top part). In each condition, infants were initially familiarized to an image containing two identical body postures and then tested with the familiarization posture and a novel body posture. The novel posture was created by changing the position of one arm and one leg from the familiarization body posture. Both 5- and 9-month-olds discriminated posture changes in the whole condition but not in the part or scrambled conditions (bottom part).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Examples of images with 0.7 and 0.9 waist-to-hip ratios (WHRs; top part). The left image in each pair depicts the 0.7 WHR whereas the right image depicts the 0.9 WHR. Preference was tested by presenting a stimulus of each kind side-by-side. Three-and-a-half-month-olds preferred the images with the smaller waist-to-hip ratios but newborns showed no preference (bottom part).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Examples of sex-congruent and sex-incongruent images (top part). Preference was tested by presenting a stimulus of each kind side-byside. Five-month-olds preferred the incongruent images but 3.5-month-olds showed no preference (bottom part).
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