1LECD - Laboratoire Éthologie Cognition Développement (Laboratoire Éthologie Cognition Développement - EA 3456
Université Paris Nanterre
BSL 1er étage
200, avenue de la République
92001 Nanterre Cedex - France)
Abstract : The ability to sense and use the body parts in an organized and differentiated manner is a precursor of body knowledge in infancy. To acquire this ability, the infant's brain might explore the perceptual consequences of its bodily actions. Undifferentiated body movements would gradually be replaced by more precise actions. Only a very few studies have tested this ‘global-to-local’ hypothesis, and none of them have so far been replicated. In this study, we assessed arm differentiation in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants using a new contingency detection task in which infants have to detect a contingency between one of their arms’ activity and an audiovisual stimulus on a screen. We found that 4- to 8-month-old infants seem to be able to use their arms in a differentiated manner. However, surprisingly, we were not able to show a developmental trend in arm differentiation between 4 and 8 months of age.
Lisa Jacquey, Sergiu Tcaci Popescu, Judith Vergne, Jacqueline Fagard, Rana Esseily, et al.. Development of body knowledge as measured by arm differentiation in infants: From global to local?. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Wiley Online Library, 2019, 38 (1), pp.108-124. ⟨10.1111/bjdp.12309⟩. ⟨hal-03677989⟩