Jieyi Liu
In my talk I will describe our research programme investigating the construction of multisensory representations of the body in infancy. I will argue that our findings support a hypothesis which I have been discussing with my colleague Vicky Southgate: That in the early months of postnatal life the human infant perceives and represents the world with minimal or no reference to their body and self. It is frequently argued and assumed that the ability to perceive one’s own body and represent the world from that body’s perspective is a primitive basis for learning about the external world of objects and people (e.g., Piaget’s infantile egocentrism). I will argue that there is little evidence to support this position, and in contrast propose that: i) an ability to perceive one’s own body and self is among the most significant and extended challenges of pre- and postnatal development, and ii) the development of the considerable early abilities which infants show in perceiving and representing external objects and people are facilitated by not referring such perceptual representations to the body or self. I will suggest that this “free-floating” nature of early infancy is an outcome of the altricial nature of human development, and facilitates the development of a suite of psychological adaptations (including enhancements of perspective taking, empathy, object recognition, and multisensory integration) which are critical to human functioning, simplifying what are typically considered to be hard developmental problems.
DFG SPP "The Active Self" 