What Babies Know About Their Bodies and Themselves
How infants’ brains respond to touch may indicate their understanding of their bodies, researchers say.
'We are accustomed to thinking about the importance of what even very young babies see and hear, but “touch is the first sensory system to develop in the baby’s brain prenatally,” and is quite well developed by the time the baby is born, said Andrew Meltzoff, the co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.
Dr. Meltzoff was the first author on a study published in late June in the journal Developmental Science, which looked at how 60-day-old infants’ brains responded when different parts of the body were gently tapped.
“We know relatively little about how the infant brain responds to touch,” Peter J. Marshall, chairman of the department of psychology at Temple University, and another author on the study, said in an email. “There is a lot of research on ‘body maps’ that respond to touch in the adult brain, but very little work on how those maps develop.”
The researchers put stretch caps containing EEG electrodes on the babies. These sensors, which are painless for the babies, record brain activity.
“There was a neural signature, a spatial distribution of electrical activity in the EEG that helped show us what part of the brain was active,” Dr. Meltzoff said. When the left hand or foot was touched, they saw activity in the right side of the brain, as they expected; in an area closer to the center for the foot, and further to the side for the hand; when the upper lip was touched, the activity was bilateral.
“Not only does this touch produce a robust and measurable response in the brain, but that response is extremely organized,” said Dr. Joni Saby, the other author. “The strongest response is to the lips, which is interesting because babies this age spend most of their time eating, sucking.” '>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/well/what-babies-know-about-their-bodies-and-themselves.html?
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