ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2019
Tune to touch: Affective touch enhances learning of face identity in 4-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. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Face Processing in Early Development: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies and Considerations in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Affective touch and face recognition: effects on memory and metacognitive performance.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A cascading effects model of early sensory development in autism.Psychological review · 2026Review
- Beyond Adversity: Definitions, Retrospective Assessment, and Experimental Manipulation of Positive Early-Life Experiences.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- Prior text-based learning enhances the benefits of simulation-based learning on confidence and long-term recall.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Rehabilitation Intervention for an Infant with Simple Epidermolysis Bullosa from NICU to Home Discharge: A Case Report.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- It's Safe to Look: Maternal Touch Affects Infants' Fear Bias.Developmental science · 2025Article
- The influence of affective touch on interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory integration in infants: evidence from heartbeat-evoked and event-related potentials.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Affective Touch in Preterm Infant Development: Neurobiological Mechanisms and Implications for Child-Caregiver Attachment and Neonatal Care.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Gaze Orienting in the Social World: An Exploration of the Role Played by Caregiving Vocal and Tactile Behaviors in Infants with Visual Impairment and in Sighted Controls.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Propensity to trust shapes perceptions of comforting touch between trustworthy human and robot partners.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Therapeutic touch and therapeutic alliance in pediatric care and neonatology: An active inference framework.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2023Article
- Oxytocin but not naturally occurring variation in caregiver touch associates with infant social orienting.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Article
- Affective regulation through touch: homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2022Article
- Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Synchrony.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Physical contact in parent-infant relationship and its effect on fostering a feeling of safety.iScience · 2021Review
- The Paternal Brain in Action: A Review of Human Fathers' fMRI Brain Responses to Child-Related Stimuli.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- In Touch with the Heartbeat: Newborns' Cardiac Sensitivity to Affective and Non-Affective Touch.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Interpersonal Affective Touch in a Virtual World: Feeling the Social Presence of Others to Overcome Loneliness.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- What Do Young Infants Do During Eye-Tracking Experiments? IP-BET - A Coding Scheme for Quantifying Spontaneous Infant and Parent Behaviour.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issuedErratum.2020
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Touch provides more than sensory input for discrimination of what is on the skin. From early in development it has a rewarding and motivational value, which may reflect an evolutionary mechanism that promotes learning and affiliative bonding. In the present study we investigated whether affective touch helps infants tune to social signals, such as faces. Four-month-old infants were habituated to an individual face with averted gaze, which typically does not engage infants to the same extent as direct gaze does. As in a previous study, in the absence of touch, infants did not learn the identity of this face. Critically, 4-month-old infants did learn to discriminate this face when parents provided gentle stroking, but they did not when they experienced a non-social tactile stimulation. A preliminary follow-up eye-tracking study (Supplementary material) revealed no significant difference in the visual scanning of faces between touch and no-touch conditions, suggesting that affective touch may not affect the distribution of visual attention, but that it may promote more efficient learning of facial information.
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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.