ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
A Naturalistic Observation of Spontaneous Touches to the Body and Environment in the First 2 Months of Life.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The role of affective touch in mental illness: a systematic review of CT fiber dysregulation in psychological disorders and the therapeutic potential of CT fiber stimulation.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- A cascading effects model of early sensory development in autism.Psychological review · 2026Review
- Automatic infant 2D pose estimation from videos: Comparing seven deep neural network methods.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Predictions of bimanual self-touch determine the temporal tuning of somatosensory perception.iScience · 2025Article
- Correction.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Article
- Altered Patterns of Maternal Behavior Transitions in Rats Exposed to Limited Bedding and Nesting Material Paradigm.Brain and behavior · 2024Article
- Artificial cognition vs. artificial intelligence for next-generation autonomous robotic agents.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
- Quantity of spontaneous touches to body and surface in very preterm and healthy term infants.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The suppression of spontaneous face touch and resulting consequences on memory performance of high and low self-touching individuals.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Newborns' early attuning to hand-to-mouth coordinated actions.Developmental science · 2022Article
- Early exploration of one's own body, exploration of objects, and motor, language, and cognitive development relate dynamically across the first two years of life.Developmental psychology · 2022Article
- Body representation in infants: Categorical boundaries of body parts as assessed by somatosensory mismatch negativity.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- Most self-touches are with the nondominant hand.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Importance of body representations in social-cognitive development: New insights from infant brain science.Progress in brain research · 2020Review
- An update of the development of motor behavior.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Self-generated touches to the body or supporting surface are considered important contributors to the emergence of an early sense of the body and self in infancy. Both are critical for the formation of later goal-directed actions. Very few studies have examined in detail the development of these early spontaneous touches during the first months of life. In this study, we followed weekly four infants in two naturalistic 5-min sessions (baseline and toys-in-view) as they laid alert in supine from the age of 3 weeks until they acquired head control. We found that throughout the 2 months of observation, infants engaged in a high rate of touch and spent about 50% of the time moving their hands from one touch location to the next. On most sessions, they produced up to 200 body/surface contacts and touched as many as 18 different areas (mainly upper body and floor) both hands combined. When we did not consider the specific areas touched, the rates of touches were higher to the body than to the floor, but the duration of contacts and the most touched areas were higher for the supporting surface than for the body. Until the age of 9 weeks, we found no consistent differences in the rate of touch between head and trunk. Infants also did not display significant differences in their rate of touch between right and left hand or between conditions. However, we discovered that in the earlier weeks, infants engaged more often in what we called "complex touches." Complex touches were touches performed across several body/floor areas in one continuous bout while the hand maintained contact with the body or floor. Single touches, in contrast, corresponded to one touch to one single body or floor area at a time. We suggest that infants are active explorers of their own body and peripersonal space from day 1 and that these early self-generated and deeply embodied sensorimotor experiences form the critical foundation from which future behaviors develop.
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