Poster #128 - The (Social) Development of Self-Perception in Infancy

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Recent accounts proposed a central role of embodied interactions between caregiver and child for the emergence of the self in infancy (e.g. Ciaunica & Fotopoulou, 2017). By being in continuous interaction with the infant, caregivers provide a stream of multimodal information that serves as a learning opportunity for detecting sensorimotor contingencies. These sensorimotor contingencies have been proposed to form the basis of infant’s self-perception (e.g. de Klerk, Filippetti & Rigato, 2021). Two central sensorimotor signals delivered by the caregiver are (affective) touch or the contingency of the caregiver’s reaction to the cues of the infant. A common way to measure infant’s ability for detecting sensorimotor contingencies are looking preference paradigms: for example, in Rochat & Morgan’s (1995) study, 3- to 5-month-old infants were presented with a spatially contingent and a spatially non-contingent view of their legs. Additionally, Filippetti, Lloyd-Fox and colleagues (2015) showed that 5-month-old infants displayed more fNIRS-measured brain activation in areas commonly activated during self-perception in adults while watching a temporally contingent video of their face (compared to a temporally non-contingent video). We used both tasks to measure infants’ contingency detection ability. Moreover, in order to investigate whether maternal characteristics are related to contingency detection abilities of infants, we assessed maternal touch and mothers’ contingent reactions. 119 mother child-dyads (child mean age = 5.5 months) participated in the study. In the looking preference task, infants looked significantly longer at the contingent view than at the non-contingent view (t(108) = 9.47, p < .001; see Table 1). In the fNIRS task, infants showed significantly more peak HbO activation to the contingent than to the non-contingent view (t(43) = -2.63, p = .01) in a channel located over the left superior temporal sulcus. For both tasks, we calculated difference scores by subtracting the non-contingent view from the contingent view for the subsequent analyses. The performances in both tasks were not significantly correlated (see Table 2). Importantly, maternal touch and the contingent reactions were significantly correlated to the fNIRS activation but not to the looking preference task measure. Our results indicate that self-related contingency detection in the temporal and spatial domain might not rely on a common ability. Future research could investigate whether spatial and temporal contingency detection become interconnected later in life, as both factors have been shown to be important for self-perception in adulthood (e.g. Costantini et al., 2016; Lloyd, 2007). Furthermore, we extend previous findings that found a relation between maternal contingency and the infant’s temporal contingency detection in a looking preference task (Zmyj & Marcinkowski, 2017), by showing that maternal contingent reactions also predict self-related brain activation. To our knowledge, this study also is the first one to show that maternal touch relates to the infant’s self-related brain activation, supporting theories claiming that caregiver-child interactions promote the infant’s self-development.

Authors

• Nina-Alisa Hinz, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  Presenting Author

• Carolina Pletti, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Markus Paulus, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München