ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2019
Cortical signatures of vicarious tactile experience in four-month-old infants.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. It is linked to trial NCT03546712 (Standard References Norms for Tactile Localization Acuity in Upper Limb Among the Asymptomatic Middle School Children), which is not on this map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Standard References Norms for Tactile Localization Acuity in Upper Limb Among the Asymptomatic Middle School Children: A Normative Research
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pupil Reactions to Tactile Stimulation: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- A cascading effects model of early sensory development in autism.Psychological review · 2026Review
- Vicarious Touch: A Potential Substitute for Social Touch During Touch Deprivation.European journal of social psychology · 2026Article
- Rapid visual engagement in neural processing of detailed touch interactions.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological evidence of motor contribution to vicarious affective touch.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- To touch or to be touched? comparing appraisal of vicarious execution and reception of interpersonal touch.PloS one · 2024Article
- Visual objects approaching the body modulate subsequent somatosensory processing at 4 months of age.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Rapid Processing of Observed Touch through Social Perceptual Brain Regions: An EEG-fMRI Fusion Study.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cortical signatures of visual body representation develop in human infancy.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Sensorimotor processing is dependent on observed speed during the observation of hand-hand and hand-object interactions.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Importance of body representations in social-cognitive development: New insights from infant brain science.Progress in brain research · 2020Review
- Social touch: A new vista for developmental cognitive neuroscience?Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2019Article
- Synchrony of Caresses: Does Affective Touch Help Infants to Detect Body-Related Visual-Tactile Synchrony?Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Infant brain responses to felt and observed touch of hands and feet: an MEG study.Developmental science · 2018Article
- Interpersonal Influences on Body Representations in the Infant Brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issuedErratum.2020
Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The human brain recruits similar brain regions when a state is experienced (e.g., touch, pain, actions) and when that state is passively observed in other individuals. In adults, seeing other people being touched activates similar brain areas as when we experience touch ourselves. Here we show that already by four months of age, cortical responses to tactile stimulation are modulated by visual information specifying another person being touched. We recorded somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) in 4-month-old infants while they were presented with brief vibrotactile stimuli to the hands. At the same time that the tactile stimuli were presented the infants observed another person's hand being touched by a soft paintbrush or approached by the paintbrush which then touched the surface next to their hand. A prominent positive peak in SEPs contralateral to the site of tactile stimulation around 130 ms after the tactile stimulus onset was of a significantly larger amplitude for the "Surface" trials than for the "Hand" trials. These findings indicate that, even at four months of age, somatosensory cortex is not only involved in the personal experience of touch but can also be vicariously recruited by seeing other people being touched.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.