Poster #159 - Structural Perception of Feet in Infancy

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Integrative Statement

The “like-me” model of development assumes that infants either have innate knowledge about body parts or quickly gain knowledge through observing and imitating others (Marshall & Meltzoff, 2015; Meltzoff, 2011). Support for this model comes from recent studies that have found that infants exhibit structural knowledge of hands as early as 3.5 months of age (Jubran, White, Chroust, Heck, & Bhatt, 2018) and neural representation of hands as young as 60 days old (Meltzoff, Saby, & Marshall, 2018a). However, not much is known about infants’ knowledge of other body parts, like the foot. Thus, in the current study, we sought to examine infants’ sensitivity to the structure of feet.

The foot has been identified as one of many body parts that infants are able to isolate rapidly in life due to observation and imitation (Meltzoff and Moore, 1997). Further, systematic neural responses have been documented when infants experience a touch to the foot or when they observe someone else’s foot being touched (Meltzoff et al., 2018b). It is thus possible that young infants will exhibit sensitivity to the structure of feet as they did to the structure of hands (Jubran et al., 2018). However, infants may not have as much exposure to feet as to hands and feet may not be as socially relevant as hands. Consequently, sensitivity to the structure of feet may develop more slowly than knowledge of hands.

Infants at 3.5, 5, and 9 months of age (N = 72) were tested for their preference between images of intact feet and ones in which the same feet were distorted (i.e., location of at least one digit was altered to distort the typical structure, see Figure 1). Only the oldest age group exhibited sensitivity to the structure of feet by displaying a spontaneous preference for the reorganized foot, see Table 1. Furthermore, 9-month-olds’ performance did not seem to be based on low-level image features (such as symmetry) because an additional group of 9-month-olds failed to exhibit a preference when tested with inverted feet that were otherwise identical to those used in the upright condition. Therefore, by 9 months of age, infants are sufficiently sensitive to the structure of feet to spontaneously exhibit a preference for distorted over intact feet when they are presented in their canonical, upright orientation. This is in contrast to studies of infants’ structural knowledge of hands, which have documented preferences as early as 3.5 months of age (Jubran et al., 2018).

The results of the current investigation have implications for theories of body knowledge development in infancy by suggesting that sensitivity to structural information develops at different rates for different body parts. It is likely that the social relevance of and amount of exposure to each specific part determines the nature of development.

Authors

• Rachel Jubran, University of Kentucky
  Presenting Author

• Alison Heck, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ramesh Bhatt, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Author