Jason Khoury, Juraj Marusic, Sergiu Tcaci Popescu, J. Kevin O’Regan, and Matej Hoffmann
During their first year, infants develop key action-related skills, such as reaching and grasping, while learning about their bodies and their spatial relationships with the environment. As the sense of touch is almost mature at birth and self-touch behavior is prevalent in early infancy, self-contact is a candidate mechanism how infants acquire this body know-how. This study examines the spatial organization of self-touch by observing four infants in a supine position from 2 to 7 months of age, with weekly sessions of around 7 minutes.
Our analysis showed that while the frequency of self-touch and the difference between left and right hands remained stable from 7 to 28 weeks, their spatial organization changes. Initially, touches are concentrated on the upper torso but gradually shifted to peripheral areas. By around 6 months, midline crossing appeared, and hand touch patterns became less symmetrical. Contrary to the belief that head touches are most frequent, our results align with previous studies (Dimercurio et al., 2018) showing that 2-month-olds touch their torso more. We used a weighted graph to analyze touch transitions between body areas, revealing shifts in spatial organization over time. Future work will include analyzing leg touches and full movement kinematics.
DFG SPP "The Active Self" 