Filippetti M L, Lloyd-Fox S, Longo M R, Farroni T, Johnson M H
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of London, Birkbeck, UK.
Cereb Cortex. 2015 Oct;25(10):3779-87. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhu261. Epub 2014 Nov 17.
The ability to differentiate one's body from others is a fundamental aspect of social perception and has been shown to involve the integration of sense modalities attributable to the self. Though behavioral studies in infancy have investigated infants' discrimination of body-related multisensory stimuli, whether they attribute this information as belonging to the self is still unknown. In human adults, neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the recruitment of a specific set of brain regions in response to body-related multisensory integration. To test whether the infant brain integrates this information similarly to adults, in a first functional near-infrared spectroscopy study we investigated the role of visual-proprioceptive feedback when temporal cues are manipulated by showing 5-month-old infants an online video of their own face while the infant was performing movements. To explore the role of body-related contingency further, in a second study we investigated whether cortical activation in response to self-initiated movements and external tactile stimulation was similar to that found in the first study. Our results indicate that infants' specialized cortical activation in response to body-related contingencies is similar to brain activation seen in response to body awareness in adults.
将自己的身体与他人的身体区分开来的能力是社会认知的一个基本方面，并且已被证明涉及归因于自我的感觉模态的整合。尽管婴儿期的行为研究已经调查了婴儿对与身体相关的多感官刺激的辨别能力，但他们是否将这些信息归因于自我仍然未知。在成年人类中，神经影像学研究已经证明，响应与身体相关的多感官整合会募集一组特定的脑区。为了测试婴儿大脑是否与成年人一样整合这些信息，在第一项功能近红外光谱研究中，我们通过在婴儿进行动作时向5个月大的婴儿展示他们自己面部的在线视频，研究了在时间线索被操纵时视觉-本体感觉反馈的作用。为了进一步探索与身体相关的偶然性的作用，在第二项研究中，我们调查了响应自我发起的动作和外部触觉刺激时的皮层激活是否与第一项研究中发现的相似。我们的结果表明，婴儿对与身体相关的偶然性的特殊皮层激活与成年人中响应身体意识时观察到的大脑激活相似。
